Biblical literalism correlates with thinking extramarital sex is wrong

The Audacious Epigone has a post up where the title says it all, Extramarital sex wrong? Gays and supporters of same sex marriage less likely to think so. But I was curious how MARHOMO, attitudes toward gay marriage, stacked up against other independent variables in relation to XMARSEX, attitudes toward extramarital sex. Here is what XMARSEX is representing:

What is your opinion about a married person having sexual relations with someone other than the marriage partner?

1 – ALWAYS WRONG
2 – ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG
3 – SOMETIMES WRONG
4 – NOT WRONG AT ALL

Here’s the logit regression from the GSS:

Logit Coefficients Test That Each Coefficient = 0
B SE(B) T-statistic Probability
MARHOMO -.166 .035 -4.706 .000
SEX -.371 .095 -3.905 .000
RACE .046 .074 .626 .531
INCOME -.079 .021 -3.764 .000
DEGREE .246 .039 6.358 .000
POLVIEWS -.111 .036 -3.105 .002
GOD -.131 .036 -3.643 .000
RELIG -.024 .026 -.918 .359
BIBLE .587 .075 7.821 .000
CHILDS -.098 .033 -2.941 .003
REGION -.072 .018 -3.978 .000
AGE .006 .003 1.882 .060
Constant .204 .457 .447 .655

Like my previous posts you can see attitudes about the Bible have a huge effect. Let’s look at how BIBLE and XMARSEX relate specifically:

Cells contain:
-Column percent
-Weighted N
BIBLE
1
WORD OF GOD
2
INSPIRED WORD
3
BOOK OF FABLES
4
OTHER
ROW
TOTAL
XMARSEX 1: ALWAYS WRONG 90.1
4,689
80.3
6,096
59.8
1,447
71.4
118
80.3
12,350
2: ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG 5.2
272
13.3
1,009
23.0
556
17.4
29
12.1
1,865
3: SOMETIMES WRONG 3.2
169
5.2
396
12.8
309
8.3
14
5.8
888
4: NOT WRONG AT ALL 1.4
73
1.2
94
4.5
109
2.8
5
1.8
280
COL TOTAL 100.0
5,202
100.0
7,595
100.0
2,421
100.0
166
100.0
15,383
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2 Responses to Biblical literalism correlates with thinking extramarital sex is wrong

  1. Gabriel says:

    your logit regression includes a lot of variables that are coded as multi-value categorical (eg REGION) or ordinal (eg DEGREE). the categorical one is a big no-no and the ordinal one is debatable. to do it right the categorical ones need to be broken into dummy sets or at least collapsed into a dummy (eg REGION could be “south” vs. else). likewise the ordinal variables should be broken into dummy sets or recoded as continuous (eg DEGREE could be approximate years of education).

  2. David Hume says:

    thanks. i’ll try not to be so sloppy in the future!

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