Unity in Canada: Experimental measures of feelings towards people with similar or different views

Unity and social connectedness are key to forming cohesive societies, which typically experience higher well-being, growth and resilience. Using the Survey Series on People and their Communities (wave 5), this study focuses on six new experimental questions about respondents’ feelings towards people based on whether they share similar or differing views on politics, racism and gender identity. These questions were developed in response to recommendations from previous international work by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s Task Team on Social Cohesion, which highlighted the lack of measures regarding affective ties between social groups. Overall, around one-third of survey respondents reported feeling the same towards people with similar views as those with different views on racism, while over 40% reported the same scores based on people’s political views and their views on gender identity. Findings also show that a small percentage of respondents (approximately 2%) who had “very warm” feelings towards people with similar political views also had “very cold” feelings towards those with differing views. In comparison, 24% of people had these feelings towards others based on their views on racism, and 15% had them based on their views on gender identity. The study also examined the sociodemographic characteristics associated with expressing such varying affective distances, which includes higher affective distance observed among respondents who were highly educated, younger, and those born in Canada.