Northern Ireland and Greece have the highest proportion of bigoted and homophobic people in the western world, according to new international research by Professor Vani Borooah. Nearly 32,000 people in 23 European countries as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA were asked as part of the Human Beliefs and Values Survey - Would you like to have persons from this group as your neighbours? The five groups were people of another race, immigrants or foreign workers, Muslims, Jews and homosexuals. The study was carried out by Vani Borooah, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Ulster and John Mangan, Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland and is to be published in the prestigious economics journal, Kyklos. New Zealand scores very well on the race question, but not the gay question, being about 4 percentage points above the average. New Zealand is ranked 10th out of 23 countries for the gay question, yet its lowest ranking for the other two questions that were asked here is 7th. In Northern Ireland 44% of the 1,000 respondents did not want persons from at least one of the five groups as their neighbours. The province was closely followed by Greece (43%). The lowest proportion of bigots was in Sweden (13%), Iceland (18%), Canada (22%) and Denmark (22%). As regards each of the five groups the percentage of respondents in Northern Ireland who would not like them as neighbours was homosexuals (35.9%), immigrants or foreign workers (18.9%), Muslims (16%), Jews (11.6%) and people of a different race (11.1%). For the same groups, the average of all the countries surveyed was respectively 19.6%, 10.1%, 14.5%, 9.5% and 8.5%. Homophobia was by far the main source of bigotry in most western countries: over 80% of bigoted persons in Northern Ireland and Canada and 75% of bigots in Austria, the USA, Great Britain, Ireland and Italy would not want homosexuals as neighbours. The study also explored who among the various countries' populations were most likely to be bigots. It found: · Women are less likely to be bigoted than men. · The young (15-29 years) and middle-aged (30-49) were less likely to be bigoted than those aged over 50. · People who were unhappy were more likely to be bigoted than those who were not unhappy. · Some evidence that financial dissatisfaction might also be a source of bigotry. · Right wingers, especially those who felt their government's priority should be 'maintaining order in the nation', were more likely to be bigots than those whose politics were middle-of-the-road or left-wing. · Students were less likely to be bigots than non-students. · Those in socio-economic classes A-B (upper and upper-middle class); C1 (middle class, non-manual) and C2 (middle, manual) were less likely to be bigoted than those in D-E (unskilled manual). The full article may be downloaded from the link below. Ref: Ulster News (m)
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Friday, 9th February 2007 - 12:00pm