BY JACOB POUSHTER AND NICHOLAS KENT
Despite major changes in laws and norms surrounding the issue of same-sex marriage and the rights of LGBT people around the world, public opinion on the acceptance of homosexuality in society remains sharply divided by country, region and economic development.
This analysis focuses on whether people around the world think that homosexuality should be accepted by society or not. The full question wording was, “And which one of these comes closer to your opinion? Homosexuality should be accepted by society OR Homosexuality should not be accepted by society.”
The question is a long-term trend, first asked in the U.S. by the Pew Research Center in 1994 and globally in 2002. Respondents had an option to not answer the question (they could volunteer “don’t know” or refuse to answer the question). Respondents did not get any further instructions on how to interpret the question and no significant problems were noted during the fielding of the survey.
The term “homosexuality,” while sometimes considered anachronistic in the current era, is the most applicable and easily translatable term to use when asking this question across societies and languages and has been used in other cross-national studies, including the World Values Survey.
For this report, we used data from a survey conducted across 34 countries from May 13 to Oct. 2, 2019, totaling 38,426 respondents. The surveys were conducted face to face across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and on the phone in United States and Canada. In the Asia-Pacific region, face-to-face surveys were conducted in India, Indonesia and the Philippines, while phone surveys were administered in Australia, Japan and South Korea. Across Europe, the survey was conducted over the phone in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, but face to face in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and the survey methodology.