The Effect of Education on Social Tolerance: Controlling for Social Desirability Bias

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 23. Education, Identity, and the Body

Abstract

This paper investigates whether the effect of education on social tolerance is consistently positive across different time periods. Since the numbers of enrollment in higher education have been increasing for the past decades, the influence of education could have changed. With the data from General Social Survey (GSS): 1977-2012 and hierarchical age-period-cohort models, the results from this study show that: 1) people with more education express more positive attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexual acceptance; 2) the effect of education on attitudes toward homosexuality has been continuously increasing over time; and 3) the effect of education on homosexual acceptance is small, but is still positive over time periods. Society has become more tolerant of homosexuality and homosexual acceptance, and younger generations have been shown to be more open to homosexual acceptance and more tolerant than older generations. Liberal religious and political views are positively associated with homosexuality and homosexual acceptance. Finally, with Monte Carlo simulation and comparison between simulation and OLS results, the paper also finds that social desirability bias influences individual attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexual acceptance. Social desirability bias decreases the estimate of education on homosexuality and homosexual acceptance.

Author

• Wei-Lin Chen, University of Iowa