ICPSR Metadata record for General Social Survey, 1972-2010 [Cumulative File] ICPSR ICPSR metadata records are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/). General Social Survey, 1972-2010 [Cumulative File] Smith, Tom W. Marsden, Peter V. Hout, Michael Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research ICPSR 2013-02-07 31521 doi://10.3886/ICPSR31521.v1
The General Social Surveys (GSS) were designed as part of a data diffusion project in 1972. The GSS replicated questionnaire items and wording in order to facilitate time-trend studies. The latest survey, GSS 2010, includes a cumulative file that merges all 28 General Social Surveys into a single file containing data from 1972 to 2010. The items appearing in the surveys are one of three types: Permanent questions that occur on each survey, rotating questions that appear on two out of every three surveys (1973, 1974, and 1976, or 1973, 1975, and 1976), and a few occasional questions such as split ballot experiments that occur in a single survey. The 2010 surveys included four topic modules: quality of working life, science, shared capitalism, and CDC high risk behaviors. The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) module included in the 2010 survey was environment. The data also contain several variables describing the demographic characteristics of the respondents.
 UniverseScheme31521 General Social Survey Series For more information on the series, please go to http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ICPSR/series/00028. Organization31521_1 AHRQMCC.I ICPSR.XVI.A abortion Affirmative Action agriculture AIDS alcohol altruism birth control business capital punishment children citizenship civil rights communism community participation compensation computer use corporations courts crime democracy dissent divorce drug use economic issues employment environment environmental attitudes environmental protection ethnicity euthanasia expenditures families foreign affairs freedom gender gender issues gender roles government health housing human rights hunting immigration income industry Jews labor unions marijuana marriage media coverage mental health military draft military service national identity occupations parents patients physicians police politics poverty prejudice privacy race relations racial attitudes religion school prayer science sexual behavior sexual preference smoking social classes social inequality social mobility social networks Social Security sports suicide taxes technology television terminal illnesses terrorism unemployment welfare services work United States 1972 2010 individual survey data All noninstitutionalized, English and Spanish speaking persons 18 years of age or older, living in the United States. For sampling information, please see Appendix A of the ICPSR Codebook. 1972 1978 1980 1980 1982 1991 1993 1993 1994 1994 1996 1996 1998 1998 2000 2000 2002 2002 2004 2004 2006 2006 2008 2008 2010 2010

ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
Due to the number of weights and various uses for them, users should refer to Appendix A of the ICPSR Codebook. Approximately 70 percent. ICPSR
AVAILABLE. This study is freely available to the general public.
The original collector of the data, ICPSR, and the relevant funding agency bear no responsibility for use of the data or for interpretations or inferences based upon such uses.
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Rearch ICPSR
Ann Arbor MI
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ netmail@icpsr.umich.edu National Science Foundation 2013-02-07 ICPSR 2013-02-07 Documentation was updated. StudyUnit31521
Additional information regarding the General Social Surveys can be found at the General Social Survey (GSS) Web site and the Roper Center Web site.