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Personality Traits and Individual Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Marriage: Evidence from Taiwan

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A Correction to this article was published on 04 December 2019

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Abstract

While same-sex marriage has been a particularly salient issue in recent years in Taiwan, few scholarly attentions have been paid to examine the determinants of individual attitudes toward same-sex marriage. This study attempts to understand how personality influences individual support for same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Using the original data collected in July 2017 in Taiwan, this study finds that people with higher levels of agreeableness are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage. Besides, conscientiousness and openness to experience have heterogeneous effects on individual attitudes toward same-sex marriage for people of different ages. Specifically, a higher level of conscientiousness is positively associated with support for same-sex marriage among younger people but is negatively correlated with support for same-sex marriage among older people. Similarly, a higher level of openness to experience would lead to increased support for same-sex marriage for younger people but would result in decreased support for same-sex marriage for older people. Overall, our findings indicate that personality can provide some explanatory power for individual attitudes toward homosexual rights.

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Change history

  • 04 December 2019

    The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The name of “Tsong-Jyi Lin” is now corrected in the author group of this article.

Notes

  1. The response rate of the survey is 16.7%. The reduction of sample size is mainly due to missing values in terms of individual responses to the questions about support for same-sex marriage. Two hundred and twelve respondents offer non-response options such as “refused to answer,” “difficult to say,” “no opinion,” and “do not know.” On the other hand, there are also many missing values in terms of individual responses to the personality questions. The non-responses to the questions about support for same-sex marriage and personality traits combined with missing values in terms of the other variables lead to a total of 413 missing observations. Please see Table 5 with regard to the numbers of missing values for all variables. Besides, this study tests whether there are significant differences between the respondents who give effective answers and those who offer non-response to the question about support for same-sex marriage in terms of education, gender, and age. The results show no significant differences between them in terms of demographic characteristics. Therefore, missing data can be viewed as missing at random and there is no need to use multiple imputation methods.

  2. While the TIPI has some advantages to capture individuals’ personality, it is noted that some TIPI questions tap into political orientations and viewpoints and thus the TIPI might be endogenous to political attitudes.

  3. Some might argue that religiosity which is often operationalized by the frequency of attending religious services and/or the importance of religion in individual life comes into play when it comes to individual attitudes toward same-sex marriage. This study acknowledges the role of religiosity in individual attitudes toward same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, the survey does not include questions about religiosity and thus this study could not include religiosity in the models.

  4. Figure 2 shows the average predicted probabilities of support for same-sex marriage for different values of agreeableness by holding all other variables at their observed values.

  5. This study also performs multiple imputation with 10 iterations for missing data to examine the effects of personality traits on individual attitudes toward same-sex marriage. As demonstrated in Table 6, the results are consistent with the findings of Table 3, suggesting that missing data do not influence the substantive conclusions this study arrives at.

  6. Detailed results about the ANOVA test are available upon request.

  7. Likewise, we compute the average predicted probabilities by holding all other variables at their observed values.

  8. Likewise, this study conducts multiple imputation with 10 iterations for missing data to investigate how conscientiousness and openness to experience interact with age to affect individual attitudes toward same-sex marriage. As displayed in Table 7, the results are consistent with the findings of Table 4 and thus missing data do not influence the findings of this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Road, Tainan City, 701, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Ching-Hsing Wang

  2. Department of Public Administration, Tamkang University, No. 151, Yingzhuan Rd., Tamsui Dist., New Taipei City, 25137, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Tsong-jyi Lin & Yi-Bin Chang

  3. Department of Political Science, Sam Houston State University, SHSU Box 2149, Huntsville, TX, 77341, USA

    Dennis Lu-Chung Weng

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  1. Ching-Hsing Wang
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Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 The numbers of missing values for the variables
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Table 6 Binary logit analysis of support for same-sex marriage using multiple imputation
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Table 7 Binary logit analysis of support for same-sex marriage using multiple imputation—interaction effects
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Wang, CH., Lin, Tj., Weng, D.LC. et al. Personality Traits and Individual Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Marriage: Evidence from Taiwan. Sex Res Soc Policy 17, 524–540 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-019-00401-4

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