Posted by Jay Livingston
On questions of interracial dating and homosexuality, older people are generally more conservative than younger people. But is that because people get more conservative as they age, or is it because different generations have different ideas? (The aging effect is also known as “life-cycle”; the generation effect is also referred to as “cohort.”)
When I blogged this last May (here) in connection with a story about segregated high school proms, I forgot to add a third factor – the effects of historical change. Regardless of age or generation, people who experience the same historical changes – the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, 9/11 – may be affected in a similar way whether they are in their teens or their seventies.
In that post, I wondered whether today’s kids will get more conservative as they age. Or will they retain the attitudes of their generation? The Pew Foundation has some relevant information. Its report on “Millenials,” has a graph showing changes in attitudes towards interracial dating in each of four cohorts.
Each generation is more accepting of interracial dating than are those that came before. And each generation itself becomes more liberal over time. As the report’s authors, Scott Keeter and Paul Taylor, say, the upward trend of all lines is probably not part of some general liberalization over the life cycle; it is almost certainly a period effect. When it comes to interracial dating, we’ve all become liberals.
(I don’t know what happened in 1991 to make the older generations become suddenly more accepting of interracial dating. A change in the wording of the question? A change in the formula for choosing the sample? Or was it a real change in attitude?)
Hat tip: Lisa at Sociological Images.
9 comments:
since when is opposition to inter-racial dating considered conservative?
Most places I've looked identify opposition to interracial dating as conservative. Does anyone classify such opposition as liberal?
It's conservative in the same sense that opposition to homosexuality or gay marriage is conservative. The GSS doesn't ask about dating, but it does ask about laws against interracial marriage. Of those who favor such laws, 9 out of 10 say homosexuality is "always wrong." Of those who oppose such laws, 63% say homosexuality is always wrong. That's a pretty big difference.
Those who favored miscegenation laws were also more likely to vote for Bush over Gore (67% vs. 50%) in 2000, the last election the GSS has data for on both variables.
But the correlation with voting preferences isn't overwhelming (except if you go back to the Wallace and Nixon vote in 1968).
anonymous,
i see this as a "most X are Y" vs "most Y are X" kind of issue and also as an is/ought issue.
i see your question as implying that there's implicitly or explicitly a conservative creed somewhere and "opposition to miscegenation" ain't on it and if anything an openness to miscegenation is implied by the principle of "color blindness" which most definitely is in the creed. fair enough. and yet as jay shows in his response, opposition to miscegenation does tend to be found most commonly among self-identified conservatives.
another way to look at is to imagine another question on, say, truther-ism or slavery reparations. we could easily imagine that these ideas would be found mostly among people on the left and so their popularity might be a function of left-wing ideas generally, even if these ideas are not held by most left-wing people nor part of the liberal or progressive creed.
I don't know if something specific happened in 1991 to cause this, but I have another source that points out the importance of this year in regards to interracial dating.
Religious Tolerance says that in 1991, opposition to interracial marriage became the minority position. They give a USA Today article as reference. But I think the source is this Gallup poll.
It looks like we may have two different measures of something happening in 1991.
Yvonne, thanks for the link. The graph for interracial marriage shows a fairly gradual and steady shift. The lines may cross in 1991, but they'd been drawing closer before that. The lines in the graph on interracial dating show a considerable jump in a single year.
I don't see why attitudes on dating should change in a different way from attitudes on marriage, so I'm even more inclined to suspect that the big shift in dating had more to do with the a change in methodology than with a change in attitudes.
Jay, I'm not so sure that we've all become liberals on the issue of interracial dating when the story you wrote about last May (and updated here: http://tinyurl.com/lu59af) shows that things like segregated proms are still foisted on young people by their parents.
Certainly it's generational and seems to be happening only in a minority of areas of the deep south. But what is both striking and sad is the students seem to express an almost disbelief in the backwardness of it all.
Re 1991 and the decline among the older generation,don't forget another possibility: the oldest members of the "older" group are dying off. If they are disproportionately opposed, that could generate the observed effect. But perhaps this has already been checked?
Once you say it, it's obvious, but it didn't occur to me previously -- I guess I shouldn't have skipped the demography course. In any age cohort that spans several years, the conservatives are the first to go, though not, for better or worse, because of their political views. But I still suspect that the across-the-board jump in 1991 was a methodological artifact.
It looks like we may have two different measures of something happening.
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