Blackbeard Blog

hardcorefornerds:

tristn:

brooklynmutt:

A new CBS News/ New York Times poll finds that the wording of the question is key when it comes to determining whether Americans support allowing gays to serve in the military.

continue reading… cbsnews

Huh? Why would homosexual have such a queer statistically significant connotation.

in case there might be possible confusion, it’s as well to point out that the differently worded questions were asked of separate (but, hopefully, essentially similar) groups. no one had the choice, or opportunity, to change their own individual opinion depending on whether the term “homosexuals” or “gay/lesbian” were used.

One flaw in the table is that it doesn’t make it easy to compare the top and bottom questions: 59%/29% for homosexuals “serving” and 70%/19% for gay/lesbian, to be compared against the bottom table.

Word choice is already known to be very important in polling, although it’s especially surprising here given the, one-would-think, closeness of the terms and the consequent range of disparity. Additionally, “somewhat favour” serving sort of bucks the established trend, so it’s a little unfortunate that they didn’t ask the second question in the same way (here is the detail on the poll). We’re only talking of subgroups of about 500 (the margin of error for the full group is given as +/- 3%), but it seems that while more people oppose and less people favour ‘homosexuals’ in the military than ‘gay/lesbians’, more people favour homosexuals “not so strongly”.

Finally, while this might appear like typical “conservative American idiocy”, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a similar effect in UK/Ireland (no doubt masked by slight different cultural associations of the terms). I mean, although I reckon that I’m intelligent (and progressive) enough to answer the question the same way in either case, I can perceive that the two might have different connotations. Interesting fact: Ireland - yes, we have a military - ensured that lesbians and gay men can serve in the defence forces in 1993, directly after we decriminalised homosexuality. yeah. (oh, but wait, that was ten years before the entire United States…)

Good analysis. Wording wording wording!