A great deal of work has been done in recent years on ‘generalised trust’, often based on responses to a single item. Is there such a thing as ‘generalised tolerance’, and how can it be measured?
One approach is to use a battery of items, as for example in the European Values Study (EVS). The EVS investigates how Europeans think about life, family, work, religion, politics and society; nearly 70,000 people in 46 countries were interviewed for the fourth wave in 2008/2009. Respondents were given a list of 15 groups of people (including ‘drug addicts’, ‘homosexuals’, ‘immigrants/foreign workers’, etc.) and asked to identify any that they would not, generally speaking, like to have as neighbours.
It has become clear that this battery was presented in different ways in different countries or perhaps by different interviewers: sometimes as a block, and sometimes with each group considered individually. I will try to assess the impact of this ambiguity on the results. I will also compare the data on hypothetical neighbours with other variables that measure attitudes towards drugs, homosexuality and immigration.
Presented by:
David Voas (ISER)
Date & time:
March 21, 2012 1:00 pm
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