Hyewon Kwon
November 29, 2022
Group 7: Hyewon Kwon, Gavin Craft, Jordan Striebig, Yipeng Zhao
Class: Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Attitudes
Study on Death Penalty and Religious Beliefs
Project Abstract
The research focuses on individuals' influence and information ability to form opinions on the death penalty and its use in modern-day America. The United States still has ongoing capital punishment in about half of the states, and some scholars have been suggesting that strong religious beliefs in Christianity affected the American population's supportive attitudes toward the death penalty. However, the relationship between Christians and their views on the death penalty is not proved in the research, and so is with Catholicism. One confirmed that Catholics are far more likely to support using the death penalty than Christians.
Survey Design
The survey was designed based on hypotheses, aiming to examine the impact of religious identification, Christian affiliation, and religious importance on individuals' views regarding the death penalty. The survey consisted of questions related to respondents' demographics, political beliefs, and feelings about various social issues. The critical variables in the study were respondents' religious identification as Christian or Catholic and religious importance in their lives. The survey collected responses from 163 participants by November 23, 2022, and included questions about ideology, political party affiliation, race/ethnicity, sex, gender, and education level. Data analysis was conducted using regression analyses to explore the relationships between variables and feelings about the death penalty.
Result
There was no evidence of a relationship between religious importance and views on the death penalty. It was observed that being Catholic was associated with a significant and oderately strong negative relatonship with support for the death peantly. The correlation coefficient for this relationship was -0.646, indicating a moderate strength of association. This means that Catholics were more likely to favor the death penalty for those convicted of murder compared to individuals of other Christian denominations. In addition, there was no significant relationship between religious identity and sentiments regarding the death penalty. Similarly, there was no significant association between religious importance and views on the death penalty.