Reggie Len

Period 7

A current, controversial issue that has been the topic of high-tension debate has

been border patrol and immigration control. I had a group of four people, and three

of them (me included) are Latino. This is an issue that affects us directly , and we

wanted to know about attitudes towards immigrants during this politically-charged

age. We sought to test the variables that affected/was affected by attitudes

towards immigrants and how much they affected/were affected by them .

We decided that the two most important variables were attitudes towards

immigrants, and knowledge of current policies and orders. We werent sure how we

wanted to research the questions asked, but eventually we came up with the

hypothesis, There is a positive, parabolic correlation between the attitudes

towards immigrants and knowledge of current immigration policy . We believed

that those who cared strongly towards immigrants (negative or positive) would

learn more about the current policies, while those who dont care much for

immigrants would keep from researching it. This is important immigration policy

affects the majority of people in our group, but also it is incredibly current. On top
of that, we find it important to know how much people who feel very strongly

actually know; it is dangerous if people who have no knowledge of certain policies to

have strong influence in making those policies. Considering this is also a very

emotionally-charged issue, people should know about the intricacies of the policies

before they make a strong opinion.

Our group created a survey that asked what we concluded were key

questions. Not just the two we wanted but also other things we thought might

affect the results. We chose to ask: ethnicity, age, religious involvement , family

involvement/how often they discussed politics with their family , and main source of

news. With ethnicity, we explicitly sought to split that into Latino and non-Latino ,

seeing as the specific issue tends to affect Latinos disproportionately . That we

just asked if the surveyee identified as Latino. We originally had age as an

important question, since we believed that older groups would be more against

immigrants but also possibly know more about such issues. However , the entirety of

our age range fell from 16 years of age to 20 , and we decided it was not diverse

enough to split into groups. Thus, that one disappeared. Our group wanted to how
religious involvement affected the attitude. One member of our group believed

that high religious involvement would lead people to be more open to foreigners

because of religious values, whereas another member believed that, especially

because of the state we lived in, the more religiously involved someone was , the

more conservative they would be. So we believed this would be an important thing

to ask. We would ask what if they were religious and if so, how involved in their

religion they were. They could answer No, Mildly, Moderately, or Highly.

Next, we wanted to know if families were involved in the surveyees political

opinions. We believed that specifically for non-Latinos the more family involvement

would lead to more conservative views, since it would lead to listening to older,

probably more conservative views. The answers mirrored those of the religious

involvement question. Then we asked the main source of news. This question, in

retrospect, difficult to measure, but we believed that depending on where they got

their news, it would affect their perspective. For example, if they only got news

through social media where most news is clickbait-like, they might not be that

informed but feel very strongly. Though slightly redundant with the family

involvement question, we definitely believed that asking if they got their news
from family and friends, it would affect their perspectives. Our methodology with

the two main questions was slightly different . We would ask them to explain to us

what they knew about the current immigration and border patrol policy . We would

listen to them explain to us what they know, and when they finish, we rate their

knowledge out of ten. For the attitudes question, we asked their opinion on the

immigration policies, and then asked them to rate their own attitudes from one to

ten. One was completely against immigrants while ten was completely accepting of

immigrants, then we would rate them ourselves, taking into account everything

they have said previously.

In conclusion, we found that there was a weak, positive, linear correlation

between knowledge of current policies and attitudes towards immigrants . For

Latinos, the correlation was slightly tighter. We interviewed 14 Latinos, and they

had an attitude mean of 8.07, while average knowledge was 5.79. The correlation

of the knowledge to the attitude is shown below in brown squares . This proves a

moderate correlation between the knowledge of policies to the attitudes . This

proves us wrong, seeing as we were expecting a parabolic correlation , but instead it

is linear. The non-Latino graph was less uniform. The average knowledge was close

to the Latinos. It was 5.08. However, the average attitude was 5.73, far below the

Latino attitude. That much was expected by our group. We believed that these

people would not be as affected, and thus have less of an opinion, or be more likely

to have negative opinions. Their correlation graph is thus below. This shows more

varied attitudes and a moderate-weak correlation . Similarly, this is linear as

opposed to the hypothesized parabola. While it is not what we expected, this does

follow the general trend that more educated people tend to be more liberal in their

political views. I believe that that is part of the explanation behind this . However,

to back up our original hypothesis, those who had more than one main news source

had either extreme of opinions, leaning more towards for rather than against.

However, it is hard to find definitive patterns among any other categorization . I

believe they impact the answer much less than expected , which would make sense,

seeing as our questions dont account for which websites they use , their families

affiliation, which religion theyre privy to, etc. The age range might have something

to do with this too. Since most of them were younger, it would make sense that if

they were more involved in politics, they would be exposed to more liberal views
due to their age and location. Overall, I do believe there is a correlation, but it is

much more complicated than this study originally assumed . I would want to get data

from all over regional areas, and have it much more neatly organized by

subcategories. Also asking more specific questions about where they get their

news and their own party affiliation would be helpful .