5th International Europea Social Survey (ESS) Conference

This work aims to propose the usage of a composite indicator in studying the attitude of European people towards gay and lesbian people. From the last round of European Social Survey (ESS), three items are selected and combined by means of Categorical Principal Component Analysis (CATPCA). The aim of the composite indicator is to cover three semantic subdimensions of the attitude towards homosexuals. Each item reveals the degree of agreement or disagreement of respondents about three statements related to the ‘life’ of LGBT+ people. The agreement (or disagreement) is measured by three ordinal variables using a Likert scale. The method of CATPCA, allows to transform three ordinal variables in a continue variable obtained from the analysis factor score. Every respondent has an associated ‘intolerance’ score (IS) towards homosexuals. In the second part of the work, the focus is on comparison of the ISs value among European Countries. The ultimate purpose being to point out the factors related to intolerance attitude through a quantile regression model.