Attitudes Towards Capital Punishment Among Undergraduate Students

There has been a significant decrease in American's support for the death penalty over the years. Consequently, we have witnessed more states abolishing the use of the death penalty. According to the data from the General Social Survey (GSS) 57% of Americans aged 65+ were in favor of the death penalty. This study analyzes the attitudes of the undergraduate population at the University of Miami towards the death penalty to observe general trends in attitudes among a younger sample. In this sample (N=200) with a mean age of 20 years old, only 32.5% of students favored the death penalty. A cross tabulation was performed to further analyze students' attitudes towards the use of the death penalty based on the following variables: major, gender, year group, race, and political affiliation. Of all the variables studied, only political affiliation was found to have a significant difference in attitudes. The chi square was 31.956, (x² =31.956, p = <0.001). From this information we then looked at how each political affiliation differed based on attitudes toward the death penalty for different types of crimes using an ANOVA test. Of all the types of crimes studied, the following were found to be significant: 1^st degree murder (F_3,194 = 9.840, p= <.001), 2^nd degree murder (F_3,194 = 4.668, p= .004), 3^rd degree murder, (F_3,191 = 3.849, p= .010), rape (F_3,192 = 2.756, p= .044), robbery (F_3,191 = 2.815, p= .040), aggravated assault (F_3,191 = 3.750, p= .012), arson (F_3,191 = 7.044, p= <.001).