Measuring the multiple facets of tolerance using survey data

In recent studies, there has been a growing interest toward tolerance and its implications in social and economic systems. So far, the openness of people to homosexuals or to foreign-born people has been considered the best indicator of tolerant attitudes. In this paper, we consider tolerance as a multi-faced phenomenon involving several different social domains. The aim is to provide some recommen- dations on how to develop a multidimensional index for tolerance in the case of survey’s items measured by Likert-scale. Our discussion relies on a case study about a student survey carried out at Milan-Bicocca University.