What Explains the Age Gap in Support for Same-Sex Marriage?

In a recent post on the "Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science" blog, Columbia University Professor Andrew Gelman discusses some analysis he's done with public opinion data from the Annenberg Public Policy Center on support for same-sex marriage (among other things) across different age groups.

One of his more surprising findings is that although young adults are considerably more supportive of state laws that would allow same-sex marriage than middle-aged ones, they're not more likely to report knowing someone who's gay, which suggests that a commonly asserted explanation for young adults' relative support for same-sex marriage -- that they're more likely to know, and therefore sympathize with, people who are most directly affected by same-sex marriage legislation -- is probably not as useful as it seems at first glance.

You can read the full post for more information about the wording of the questions that were used to elicit the data for Dr. Gelman's analysis and what he plans to do next to try to get a better handle on what explains the age gap in support for state laws allowing same-sex marriage. The reader comments at the bottom of the page also raise some interesting possibilities about why the data look the way they do and what underlying explanations might be driving them.