GVPT100
5/8/13
Final Paper Assignment
Religious Attendance and its Affect on Feelings toward Homosexuals For a long time, it has been known that the more religious an individual is, the less likely he/she would be to have positive feelings toward gay men and lesbians. This is because many religious ideologies characterize homosexuality as a sin. Religion is usually introduced to one at a young age so those attitudes and beliefs would stick with a person despite a changing society, like the one we are in today. In this analysis, I am interested in investigating how an individual’s level of religious attendance affects their feelings toward homosexuals. The independent variable is the level of religious attendance and the dependent variable is the feeling thermometer towards gay males and lesbians. Both of these variables are interval variables. To account for a rival explanation, I will be including a control variable of gender because this is another factor that could affect feelings toward homosexuals. My hypothesis and rival explanation using these variables are as follows:
Hypothesis: In a comparison of individuals, those having a higher level of religious attendance will give a lower feeling thermometer towards homosexuals than those with lower levels of religious attendance.
Rival Explanation: In a comparison of individuals, women will be more likely to give a higher feeling thermometer towards homosexuals than men. In this analysis, I expect the independent variable, level of religious attendance, to have a negative relationship with the dependent variable, score of homosexuals on the feeling thermometer. Higher levels of religious attendance will most likely mean that the individual is closely bound to their religion and attentively follows its beliefs. This means that these same individuals will probably be the ones with strong views against gay men and lesbians because of the fact that homosexuality is seen as a sin in many religious denominations. However, I expect the control variable, gender, to be positively associated with the dependent variable, feeling thermometer toward gay men and lesbians. Women are generally known to be more liberal and open-minded than men but also, lesbians are better accepted among their female peers than gay men are among their male peers. Therefore, women may feel more comfortable coming out and accepting those that are homosexual than men would be so they will be more likely to score higher on the feeling thermometer toward homosexuals. The null hypothesis for this experiment states that having a higher level of religious attendance will have no effect on the feeling thermometer scale towards gay men and lesbians and that if there is a relationship seen, it was