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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28014 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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I'm not sure there's enough detail in the linked article to draw any meaningful conclusions. Were a number of young people asked "do you accept homosexuality?" as a single binary-choice question, or were they responding to longer surveys that included questions from "Should gay sex be illegal?" to "Do you think pride parades include too much publicly indecency" or "Do you think there's too much focus on LGBT representation in the media"? If the latter case, any nuanced set of opinions over a range of topics would probably still be reported by the media as "unaccepting" even though this would be quite different from simply answering "yes" in the first case.

There is some source data here: https://ggdgezondheidinbeeld.nl/ (in Dutch)

For the survey mentioned in the linked article, they surveyed 5351 high school students in grades 2 and 4 (ages between 13 and 16). The survey is primarily about life style and (mental) health; the question about acceptance of homosexuality was phrased like this:

What's your opinion on two girls/women or boys/men being in love with each other?

❑ Normal
❑ A little weird
❑ Very weird
❑ Wrong

Apparently 46% answered normal (down from 71% in 2019) and 25% answered wrong (up from 13%).

I haven't verified it myself, but looking through the Reddit threads apparently it was the classic loaded survey technique of offering a range of responses and coding all of them except one extreme the same way.

https://old.reddit.com/r/askgaybros/comments/1d47y07/less_than_half_of_amsterdam_youth_accept/

I took the questionnaire from the GGD Amsterdam that was used for this research. Of the 122 questions, exactly one is about this topic. The question is, “What do you think if two girls/females or two boys/men are in love with each other?” The answers are:

  • Normal
  • A bit weird
  • Very weird
  • Wrong

They interpreted every single answer that was not "Normal" as a lack of acceptance. Many people chose options 2 and 3, with a minority actually picking "wrong".

It also has whatever ambiguities accompany the words for "normal" and "weird" in Dutch. Now, that doesn't explain the rapid shift on its own but it might help. Maybe young people have recently had less exposure to discourse regarding homosexuality so they don't know that in this case the "correct" answer is that a rare condition is completely normal?

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