How Islamophobic are Australians?

The scale we used to measure Islamophobia consisted of seven statements. These were:

Just to be safe it is important to stay away from places where Muslims could be.

I would feel comfortable speaking with a Muslim.

I would support any policy that will stop the building of a new mosque.

If I could, I would avoid contact with Muslims.

I would live in a place where there are Muslims.

Muslims should be allowed to work in places where many Australians gather such as airports.

If possible, I would avoid going to places where Muslims would be.

We randomly selected a sample of 1,000 adult Australians. The respondents were asked how they felt about each of the statements. The five options were: strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree and strongly disagree.


To obtain a single summary score, strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree and strongly disagree were given scores of one, two, three, four and five respectively.

In questions one, three, four and seven, “strongly agree” and “agree” reflect anti-Islam attitudes. In the other three questions, the same responses reflect the opposite. We reversed the scores for items one, two, four and seven in order to compute the values ranging from one to five. One represents low levels of Islamophobia, while five is high.

These findings are reported in the table below.


Our findings show almost 70% of Australians appeared to have a very low level of Islamophobic attitudes.

But the individual item responses provide a nuanced understanding of the intensity of such feelings and attitudes. We found 20% were undecided about how they truly felt. Less than 10% fell into the highly Islamophobic category.

Pockets of Islamophobia

We performed further analysis to ascertain levels of Islamophobia by state, capital city, gender, age, educational attainment, labour-force status, occupation, political affiliation and contact with Muslims and religious affiliations.

Our results showed Islamophobia increased with age and declined with level of education. On average, residents of Victoria were less Islamophobic than their New South Wale counterparts. There wasn’t much difference in the other states.

Those from non-English-speaking background were more likely to be Islamophobic compared to those born in Australia and those from English-speaking backgrounds. Respondents not in the labour force were also more likely to score higher on Islamophobia.

Capital-city and non-capital-city residence, gender and employment status had no effect. Liberal and National party supporters were more likely to be Islamophobic than Labor and Greens voters, and people with no political affiliations.

Australians who regularly come in contact with Muslims and those who believe immigrants make important contribution to society are significantly less Islamophobic.

So while there are pockets of antipathy towards Muslims, an overwhelming majority of Australians don’t share that antipathy.


https://theconversation.com/australians-arent-as-islamophobic-as-were-led-to-bel...

There's no such thing as Islamophobia.

Being careful to avoid skin cancer is being sun smart, not sunophobia.
Eating healthfully is called a balanced diet, not foodophobia.
Driving carefully is called defensive driving, not crashophobia.

Understanding the dangers of Islam is now called islamorealism.

Hope this helps.

And calling people weasel words is the forte of .......?

greggerypeccary wrote on Feb 27^th, 2017 at 11:29am:


That's what all traitors say.

Gordon wrote on Feb 27^th, 2017 at 11:33am:




Face it Gordy. You're in the minority.

mothra wrote on Feb 27^th, 2017 at 11:49am:


Question for ya, if Australia was to become 95% Muslim, would it remain a democratic, secular and progressive society?

If that's the case, posing a stupid question to stupid people like Mothra and Haemorrhoid is quite permissible.