Razib Khan

Category: GSS

  • Make money first, then find your church

    The New York Times has a weird article up, Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?, which digests the Pew Religious Landscape Survey descriptive statistics on the demographics of American religious denominations. It’s kind of a strange piece be…

  • Men trust people more than women do

    One of the weird things I randomly noticed when querying the “TRUST” variable in the GSS was that men were more trusting than women. I didn’t think much of that, but take a look at this logistic regression: Trust in people, …

  • Who thinks the sun goes around the earth?

    My post earlier today prompted a few emails about the bizarre result that a substantial minority of Americans accept that the sun goes around the earth. The General Social Science variable is EARTHSUN, and it asks: Now, does the Earth go around the Sun…

  • The Republican fluency with science

    The Audacious Epigone has a post up, Republicans are more scientifically literate than Democrats or independents are, where he reviews pro vs. anti-science attitude by party in the General Social Survey. He concludes that in fact Republicans are more s…

  • My parents, looking east and west

    Yesterday Michelle decided to put up a post with her own analysis of her ADMIXTURE results. With that in mind, I thought I’d revisit some results from my parents. After many runs of ADMIXTURE, both by myself and Zack, some consistent differences …

  • Does majoring in science make a difference?

    On occasion I get queries about what distinguishes people with science backgrounds from those who don’t have science backgrounds. I think an anecdote might illustrate the type of difference one is expecting. Back in undergrad I was having lunch with my lab partner, when a friend saw us and decided to chat with us as…

  • Polarization on abortion in the USA

    Some comments below made me want to look at attitudes toward abortion in the USA by ideology over the decades. I know that political party polarization on social issues has played out mostly over the past 20 years or, but I assumed that this was less evident in ideology (mostly, liberal Republicans became Democrats and…

  • A relationship in attitudes toward Global Warming & evolution?

    In my post earlier in the week I mentioned the possible relationship between attitudes toward evolution and the causes and likelihood of Global Warming. I haven’t seen any survey data myself relating the two, so naturally I wanted to poke into the General Social Survey. Two variables of interest showed up, both from 2006: 1)…

  • Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties

    Glenn Beck said some dumb, but unsurprising, things about evolution: How many people believe in evolution in this country? I’d like to see. I mean, I don’t know why it’s unreasonable to say this. I’m not God so I don’t know how God creates. I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous.…

  • Support for bans on interracial marriage by sex

    A quick follow-up to my previous post which points to the data that women tend to be more race-conscious in dating than men. There’s a variable in the GSS which asks if you support a ban on interracial marriage, RACMAR. Here’s the question itself: Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans)…

  • Most people are cool with gays teaching kids (today)

    I noticed that Jim DeMint has said some controversial things about the demographic criteria of teachers: Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) says that even though “no one” came to his defense in 2004 after he said that gay people and unwed mothers should be banned from teaching, “everyone” quietly told him that he shouldn’t back down…

  • Obnoxious speech and trusting the Other

    Update: After watching the videos of what went down at the cultural festival I seem to have unwittingly slandered the Act 17 missionaries. They behaved well and were obviously unjustly arrested. Their YouTube site is testimony to the reality though that they’re pretty shallow and obnoxious in some contexts, but that’s frankly not atypical for…

  • Is Christine O’Donnell a kook because she’s a Creationist?

    Christine O’Donnell has said a lot of kooky things. Right now people are focusing on her Creationism. Though I’m obviously not a Creationist I think mocking someone for this belief in a political context is somewhat strange: the survey literature is pretty robust that Americans are split down the middle on opinions about evolution. […]

  • Liberals more hereditarian than conservatives?

    Sometimes I run into things in the GSS which just don’t fit expectations. On occasion the results are so weird or unexpected I check my coding over and over. Or, I have a suspicion that something was input incorrectly. This is one of those cases. As often happens a comment was made as to the…

  • People with heterodox opinions are just confused

    I was having a touch of insomnia a few days ago, and wasn’t alert enough to do anything intellectually challenging, so I decided to poke around the General Social Survey. I found an interesting variable, POSTLIFE, which asks people if they believed in life after death. I decided to cross-check that against those who were…

  • Fundamentalists are not as “intelligent”

    Yesterday I pointed to an OKCupid study on personals ads on their network. I didn’t highlight the fact that the analysis of the ads seem to suggest that secular people have more sophisticated prose, and that of those who claim a religious affiliation the less strongly committed tend to be more sophisticated. The blog Political…

  • How much more racist are white conservatives than white liberals?

    A few weeks ago there were a bunch of stories on how white the audience was at Glenn Beck’s rally. That’s empirically true, and the Tea Party movement as a whole is overwhelmingly white. So is the American conservative movement. This in a nation which is ~65% white in a colloquial sense (i.e., white Hispanics…

  • The socioeconomic status of white ethnics

    In the post below on the prolific nature of the Kennedy clan some commenters were curious as to the general socioeconomic slant of Irish Catholics. The GSS has a variable ETHNIC which asks which nation an individual’s ancestors came from. Combine that with RELIG, and you can figure out how Irish Catholics stack up nationally.…

Razib Khan