Contact with gays and lesbians and same-sex marriage support: The moderating role of social context

Merino, Stephen M.

doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.02.004

Cited by 47 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Consider the rapid evolution in attitudes toward and institutionalization of gay marriage. Attitudes can be predicted by contact with gays and the contents of social networks (Merino, 2013). To understand the processes of cultural change, we need to focus on within-country variation in cultural values and beliefs and on the normative dynamics (like conformity tipping points) through which people's behavior are affected by peer behavior and by what they percieve or imagine that peers believe and prefer.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Values as the Essence of Culture

Morris

2013

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Recent findings of low societal consensus in cultural values suggest that our field's dominant paradigm-culture as shared values-is a fallacy. The perennial persistence of this illusion may come from that it appeals to the human brain's hardwired capacity for essentialism. Evidence against value consensus, however, does not doom all shared-meaning models of culture (pace Schwartz, 2013). I describe evidence for other kinds of mental representations (i.e., concepts, beliefs, norms) that are shared (in the sense of consensus, contagion, or conjoint control) and underlie culturally patterned behavior. Also I consider and probe Schwartz's (2013) proposed definition of culture as a society-level value system, raising questions about its ontology, functionalism and explanatory power, particularly with regard to understanding cultural change. While acknowledging the utility of aggregated value scores for many research programs, I conclude that psychology needs to study individual-level cultural representations and withinsociety variation in order to understand the dynamics of cultural influence and change.In popular discourse, "culture" is a vague and all-encompassing force that can be invoked to explain any of person's or group's behaviors or failings. As scientists we aim to build more precise models that avoid the fallacies of stereotypes and other intuitive biases about societal differences. Yet when we tighten our definitions of culture, we must always consider whether narrowing definitions will also narrow the questions that we can address.This essay responds to Schwartz's (2013) critique of shared-meaning models of culture and his updated theoretical justification for operationalizing culture with aggregated country-level scores from ratings of abstract values. Recent analyses have revealed that such value ratings are not highly consensual within nations, nor highly different across nations. Schwartz (2013) takes these results to have "shaken the confidence of psychology researchers in the prevailing conception of societal culture" (p. 3). Instead of the prevalent conception of culture as the values that a society's members share, Schwartz defines culture as a system of meaning that exists "external to the individual" (p. 5). On this basis, he provides a new rationalization of the methodological aproach of of operationalizing culture in terms of aggregated country-level value scores, an

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Values as the Essence of Culture

Morris

2013

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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“…Among the studies that attend to the link between religion and support for homosexuality and same‐sex marriage in the United States, the vast majority find that white conservative Protestants and black Protestants tend to be the least supportive of same‐sex marriage, while Americans who are mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or religiously unaffiliated tend to be more supportive (Baunach ; Becker ; Brumbaugh et al. ; Ellison, Acevedo, and Ramos‐Wada ; Haider‐Markel and Joslyn ; Merino ; Olson, Cadge, and Harrison ; Perry , ; Sherkat, de Vries, and Creek ; Sherkat et al. ; Whitehead ).…”

Section: Religion Biblical Literalism and Support For Same‐sex Unionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to religious tradition, studies on this topic typically include measures for one's level of “religiosity.” This is usually defined in terms of religious service attendance, but occasionally includes other practices in a scale such as prayer or sacred text reading (Whitehead , ). Accounting for these trends, scholars generally argue that embeddedness within theologically conservative religious communities influences Americans to adopt more traditionalist views of gender and sexuality and, consequently, oppose same‐sex unions as a violation of the traditional man/woman standard (Ellison, Acevedo, and Ramos‐Wada ; Merino ; Olson, Cadge, and Harrison ; Sherkat, de Vries, and Creek ; Sherkat et al. ; Whitehead ).…”

Section: Religion Biblical Literalism and Support For Same‐sex Unionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the mechanisms theorized in these studies focus on the influence of conservative theological beliefs, many of these studies neglect to account for theological beliefs directly in multivariate models, but rather infer those beliefs from religious affiliation or frequency of religious attendance or practice (e.g., Baunach ; Becker ; Bezen and Zicklin ; Brumbaugh et al. ; Campbell and Monson ; Haider‐Markel and Joslyn ; Merino ; Olson, Cadge, and Harrison ; Perry , ; Putnam and Campbell ; Sherkat, de Vries, and Creek ). Studies that do include measures of theological beliefs or fundamentalism have followed similar patterns, most often including the same single‐item measure to tap fundamentalist or theologically conservative beliefs.…”

Section: Religion Biblical Literalism and Support For Same‐sex Unionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although religious measures are invariably used in studies of public opinion toward homosexual relationships, many studies exploring the link between religious life and support for same‐sex marriage do not account for theological beliefs specifically, but rather infer theological belief from affiliation with a sectarian or conservative denomination or broad tradition like evangelicalism (Baunach ; Becker ; Brumbaugh et al. ; Merino ; Olson et al. ; Sherkat et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bible Beliefs, Conservative Religious Identity, and Same‐Sex Marriage Support: Examining Main and Moderating Effects

Perry

2015

Scientific Study of Religion

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Research finds that Americans who espouse theologically conservative beliefs about the Bible generally oppose same‐sex marriage. Studies exploring this link, however, have been limited in that their operationalization of fundamentalist belief has been problematically conceptualized and they have potentially confounded the effect of conservative religious identity. The current study asks: (1) How do distinct beliefs about the nature and authority of the Bible influence same‐sex marriage support? (2) Do these beliefs influence same‐sex marriage support independently of conservative religious identity? (3) To what extent do Bible beliefs and conservative religious identity moderate one another's effects? And (4) to what extent are these factors moderated by religious tradition and frequency of Bible reading? Analyses of 2006 Portraits of American Life Study data reveal that while identifying as religiously conservative is the strongest predictor of opposition to same‐sex marriage, believing in inerrancy and creationism remain strong predictors in full models. I also find moderating effects between belief in creationism, inerrancy, inspiration; religious‐conservative identity; and religious tradition. Findings clarify how theological beliefs and religious identity shape support for same‐sex marriage across religious traditions.

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A Social Network Analysis of Friendship and Spiritual Support in a Religious Congregation

Todd

Blevins

2019

American J of Comm Psychol

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Religious congregations are social settings where people gather together in community to pursue the sacred (Pargament, 2008). Such settings are important to understand as they provide a context for individuals to develop relationships, share ideas and resources, and connect individuals to larger society (Todd, 2017a). Yet, research to date has not deeply examined the inherently relational nature of religious congregations. Thus, in this study, we used social settings theory (Seidman, 2012; Tseng & Seidman, 2007) to develop and test hypotheses about relationships within one Christian religious congregation. In particular, we used social network analysis to test hypotheses about relational activity, popularity, and homophily for friendship and spiritual support types of relational links. Our findings demonstrate how relational patterns may be linked to participation in congregational activities, occupying a leadership role, a sense of community and spiritual satisfaction, stratification, socialization, and spiritual support. Overall, this advances theory and research on the relational aspects of religious congregations, and more broadly to the literature on social settings. Limitations, directions for future research, and implications for theory and religious congregations also are discussed.

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Contact with gays and lesbians and same-sex marriage support: The moderating role of social context

Cited by 47 publications

References 43 publications

Values as the Essence of Culture

Values as the Essence of Culture

Bible Beliefs, Conservative Religious Identity, and Same‐Sex Marriage Support: Examining Main and Moderating Effects

A Social Network Analysis of Friendship and Spiritual Support in a Religious Congregation

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