Not all love their neighbours: survey
Thursday Apr 19 15:11 AESTAlmost one in four Australians don't want homosexuals as neighbours, an international survey has found.
Australians are less bigoted on the subject than people in Northern Ireland, said John Mangan, professor of economics at the University of Queensland.
Prof Mangan is co-author of a paper interpreting statistics from the Human Beliefs and Values Survey, conducted in 24 Western countries between 1999 and 2002.
He said the results showed anti-gay prejudice was by no means confined to Australia.
"The conclusion is the most prevalent form of bigotry is homophobia," he said.
"It's everybody except Scandinavians, so it's not a particularly Australian thing."
Of the 2,048 people sampled by phone in Australia, 24.7 per cent said they did not want homosexuals living next door.
But the figure was exceeded by survey respondents in Austria (26.7 per cent), Greece (26.
, the Republic of Ireland (27.5) Italy (28.7) and Portugal (25.6).
And Northern Ireland came out on top, with 36 per cent saying they did not want gay neighbours.
The least prejudiced nationality in the survey was Sweden, where only six per cent said they would object.
Australia fared relatively well in other categories, with only 4.6 per cent of people saying they would not like people of a different race as neighbours and 4.5 per cent objecting to immigrants or foreign workers next door.
Italians, on 15.6 per cent, topped the list of those who didn't want a different race next door.
The Northern Irish held the strongest views on immigrants and foreign workers, with 19 per cent saying they were not desirable neighbours.
Prof Mangan said the reasons why the various national attitudes evolved would be the subject of further research.
Factors influencing bigotry included income levels, whether people were employed or not, education levels and political leanings.
"Tolerance seems to rise with education more than anything else," Prof Mangan said.
"But you can have quite wealthy people who are older and probably have less formal education who tend to have more fixed beliefs."
His research has been published recently in the international economics journal, Kyklos.
The paper, entitled Love Thy Neighbour: How Much Bigotry is there in Western Countries, was co-authored by Professor Vani Borooah of the University of Ulster.
İAAP 2007http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=262040We're still a nation of NIMBYs on gays
Erik Jensen
April 20, 2007NIMBY is short for: Not In My BackYardA QUARTER of Australians do not like the idea of living next door to homosexuals, a University of Queensland study has found, but less than 5 per cent do not want to live next door to foreigners.
The study, to be published in the economic journal Kyklos, was based on data from 31,625 people in 26 countries. It found that 24.7 per cent of Australians surveyed would not want gay neighbours, suggesting Australia is more homophobic than Britain (24.1 per cent) and the US (22.9 per cent).
"We did OK on everything except homosexuality," said the study's co-author, John Mangan. He said homophobia was the most prevalent bigotry in all geographical areas except Scandinavia, where "Islamophobia" was more dominant.
The data comes from the Human Beliefs and Values survey published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2004.
The survey gauged various forms of bigotry by asking people if they would want certain groups living next door.
Professor Mangan's study used economic formulas to convert this data into a "bigotry scale", taking into account variations within the socio-economic structures of different countries. It found countries where wealth is more evenly spread were less bigoted.
A spokesman for the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, Ghassan Kassisieh, said he was not surprised by the figure. "I'm comforted by the fact that 75 per cent of respondents did not have a problem living next door to a gay couple, which shows an increasing level of maturity and acceptance.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/nat.....9/1176697003221.htmlI have had gay neighbours for the past 7 years. I now have a single gay neighbour who is fast becoming a very good friend. What the hell is wrong with some people. They would rather live next door to the secretive heterosexual guy who keeps to himself and leaves the house every night between midnight and 4am (to do god knows what) than an openly gay person who has a heart of gold.
you should here the bitching ofter bingo !
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