Reasons for Supporting and Opposing Capital Punishment in the USA: A Preliminary Study

The death penalty is a controversial subject in our society. Research has explored why people support or oppose capital punishment. Most the literature to date looks at the reasons provided one at a time. In this study, a multivariate analysis was conducted to see which reasons best explain the observed variation of support and opposition for capital punishment. It was found that emotional retribution, emotional opposition, morality, and law and order, were the only reasons which had statistically significant effects on the degree of death penalty support among college students at a Midwestern university. Other variables, such as fear of crime, religious measures, other punishment ideologies, and personal characteristics (which earlier studies found statistically significant using bivariate analysis) were not statistically significant in this study. The results suggest the need for greater attention to and more study of death penalty attitudes using multivariate analysis