Measuring Tolerant Behavior

This paper addresses the issue of measuring tolerance, viewed as a multifaceted phenomenon involving several different social domains. We develop a multidimensional index for Likert-scale data, characterized by the following features: (i) it reflects the individual's intensity of tolerant attitudes towards each social domain; (ii) the index can be broken down by dimension in order to determine the contribution of each dimension to overall tolerance; (iii) the index combines the different dimensions of tolerance using a weighted scheme that reflects the importance of each dimension in determining the overall level of tolerance. To show how this new measure of tolerance works in practice, we carry out a case study using an Italian recent survey asking the opinion of university students about different subjects, such as interreligious dialog, women/religion relationship, religion/death relationship, homosexuality, and multicultural society.