Methodology

            In order to test the hypothesis we created a seventeen multiple-choice question survey.  We each shared the survey to our social media accounts in an attempt to broaden our survey results. We also asked our friends and family to take the survey. We chose a multiple-choice survey in order to expedite the amount of time to take the survey so that it would be easy for our respondents to complete in a timely manner. The independent variables in our research are ideology, age, gender, and the carefully selected welfare programs. The respondent’s attitude towards the specific welfare policies is the dependent variable of our research.

We ended up receiving 67 responses to our survey. In regards to the demographics of our respondents, 76% of them were female, 23% were male, and 1% chose not to specify. Our survey respondents’ ages ranged from 18 to 50 and over. The majority of our respondents belonged to the 18 to 25 years age group. Though there was some slight variance in location of our survey respondents, most of them were located within the state of Oklahoma. This was not surprising because we shared the survey on our social media accounts and most of our social media connections live in the state. Having more of a variance in the demographics of our survey respondents could have made a large difference in our survey results.  

            When deciding which questions to include in our survey, we chose specific types of questions that would allow us to test different aspects of general opinions that could potentially shape the respondent’s attitude. The first set of questions in the survey asked about the attitudes of gender in general in order to gauge attitudes reflected through feminist ideals. The questions asked included: support for equal pay for men and women, support for equal educational and job opportunity for men and women, and support of equal government aide for men and women. These questions helped us measure where our respondents stood in terms of their support for feminist ideals by asking questions that would be strongly supported by people who identify as feminists. We then asked in our survey if the respondent identified as a feminist. The questions that lead up to the respondent’s being specifically asked if they identified as feminist were asked to determine if the respondents held feminist values, but did not choose to identify as feminist. The second set of questions tested political preferences in the categories of ideology, general support for welfare programs, and support of different groups of welfare recipients. This set of questions asked how conservative or liberal the respondent identified as, and how supportive of WIC and food stamps in general the respondent was. We then inquired about which groups of people the respondents were more supportive of receiving WIC and food stamps. The groups receiving welfare that we included were family recipients, single mother recipients, and single father recipients. The final set of questions gathered background information on the respondents in order to determine whether their experiences, specifically experiences with gender, affected their attitudes toward welfare and its recipients. The questions asked to gain background information included: respondent’s age, gender, whether they know someone who has received WIC or food stamps, if they were currently a single parent, whether they were raised by a single parent, and if so, what gender of single parent were they raised by.

            In order to test our hypothesis, we ran a regression on the survey data.  If gendered experiences, such as being raised by a male or female single parent, compared to their opinion on welfare recipients show a significant change in responses, then the results would show that they had developed an attitude towards a certain gender. If this proved to be true, it would affect their support of that gender being on welfare. We used feminist ideals in order to determine if gendered attitudes existed. If people that are in favor of feminist ideals support welfare programs and recipients of welfare differently, then the results will show that gendered attitudes do impact support towards welfare programs and recipients in comparison to those that do not favor feminist ideals.