Deliverable 3.2 of the UNTWIST project: Qualitative vs. quantitative public opinion on gender
Creators: name: Luxton, Louise
name: Romero-Portillo, Daniel
name: Ortiz Barquero, Pablo
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Social sciences
subject: FOS: Social sciences
subject: Sociology
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: Gender studies
subject: Women's studies
subject: Gender equality
subject: Gender inequality
subject: Social issues
subject: Human rights
subject: Human rights violations
subject: Ideologies
subject: Elections
subject: Political sciences
subject: Political communication
subject: Public services
subject: Public policies
subject: Civil society
subject: Democracy

description: This report is the second deliverable outcome of Work Package 3 (WP3) of the UNTWIST project. The aim of WP3 is to analyse the representation of sex/gender and gender-based needs in public opinion instruments and public opinion data. In this report, we focus on the second of these objectives, providing descriptive analysis of public opinion data measuring the gender-based attitudes and needs of RWPP voters. We also compare these quantitative data with the qualitative insights from the focus groups conducted in WP2. The report addressed three objectives: (1) assessing whether focus group themes are reflected in public opinion survey instruments, (2) evaluating the extent to which RWPP voters' gender-based attitudes and needs can be accurately and reliably measured using existing public opinion data, and finally (3) empirically examining RWPP voters/supporters’ gender attitudes/needs as measured in the survey questions, and evaluating their alignment with findings from focus groups with RWPP voters. The report begins with an overview of the purpose and aims of this deliverable (Section 1), before outlining the data collection and analyses processes (Section 2). We provide a summary of the representation of the focus group themes in public opinion instruments (Section 4) and an assessment of the limitations to analysing RWPP voters’ gender-based needs/attitudes using our sample of public opinion data (Section 5). Finally, we present our main descriptive analyses (Section 6). 285 survey questions were selected from the dataset constructed in D3.1 based on their relevance to shared themes identified from review of the 18 focus groups carried out in consortium countries in WP2. These include gender roles, division of labour, women’s participation in the labour market, and attitudes toward LGBTQ+ individuals and to gender equality. Our key results show that RWPP voters/supporters exhibited stronger traditional views on gender roles, resistance to gender/sexuality equality measures, and opposition to feminist activism than voters/supporters of other parties, though with notable cross-country variation. Moreover, the public opinion data predominantly aligns with the nuanced findings from the focus groups. In the conclusion (Section 7), we review our key findings and the contributions that this deliverable makes to the broader UNTWIST project. These include identifying areas of strengths and weakness in current survey instruments' ability to capture RWPP voters' gender-based attitudes/needs and providing a knowledge foundation to inform analysis of results from the original survey module developed in WP6 and guide the development of new hypotheses on RWPP voter behaviour.