2022 GSS Users Guide

The General Social Survey (GSS) is a series of nationally representative sample surveys of a cross-section of U.S. adults that includes measures of attitudes, opinions, and behaviors relating to a wide range of topics going back to 1972. See The General Social Survey Website and the GSS 2022 Cross-Section Study Documentation and Public Use File Codebook for detailed information about the history, methodology, and content coverage of the survey. 

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) sponsored a module of questions about cultural and recreational activities and engagements in 2012, 2018, and 2022. This document offers guidance in downloading and using the variables in the 2022 module. You may also be interested in the NEA Research Brief, Online Audiences for Arts Programming: A Survey of Virtual Participation Amid COVID-19, based on these data. 

About the 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Supplement

Methodology

The NEA Supplement was included as a follow-on module to the 2022 fielding of the General Social Survey. Individuals who completed the entire baseline GSS between July 11, 2022 and September 21, 2022 were eligible to participate in the NEA follow-on as a self-administered web survey. GSS respondents completed the baseline survey as a face-to-face interview or via web or phone survey, but the follow-on studies were only available via web. Note: Only individuals in the national sample were eligible to participate in the follow-on modules – individuals representing oversampled groups and drawn from NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel were ineligible. Out of 2,269 eligible GSS respondents, 843 completed the NEA supplemental module for an unweighted retention rate of 37.2%. 

Content

Like the 2012 and 2018 NEA supplements, the 2022 module contained questions that asked respondents about their participation in a variety of recreational activities over the 12 months prior to the survey. The activities covered ranged from attending a live or virtual music performance or art exhibit, creating art or performing music themselves, and reading or watching movies. (The full list of variables is below.) In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 module also asked respondents to compare their participation in such activities at the time of the survey to their participation from March 2020-March 2021, the first year of the pandemic. 

Weights

Researchers wishing to draw inferences from the sample to the larger U.S. population should use either WTSSPS_NEA or WTSSNRPS_NEA post-stratification weight variables for their analyses. These weights incorporate the weights for the baseline GSS and are specific to the participants in the NEA supplement. The difference between the two weights is that the second, WTSSNRPS_NEA, incorporates an optional non-response adjustment that distributes the weight of the non-responding cases in a national frame area to the responding cases in that same area. (Make sure to use these weights from Release 2 or newer of the dataset due to a programing error in Release 1.)  

Using the 2022 NEA Supplement

The data from the 2022 Baseline GSS and the follow-on modules are available through NORC’s GSS Data Explorer. Variables can be downloaded as a custom subset (formatted for SAS, SPSS, Stata, and R) or analyzed in tables using the interface within the Explorer site. 

To use variables in tables or add them to an extract, start at the “Search Data” page. You can limit the data to 2022 using “select specific years” and then in the “filter by” box, look for “NEA” under “modules.” Hit “Search” and the list of variables will be displayed – you can “select all” to save to your MyGSS space. You can run tabulations using the variables within your MyGSS space, or you can add your “cart” of variables to an extract. If you are creating an extract, remember to include the weight variable you will be using as well as any other variables from the baseline survey that you may wish to use in your analyses. Alternatively, you can download the full 2022 dataset, which will ensure that you have the variables you need if you decide to run analyses beyond the ones you initially intend. To create the extract, choose “Extracts” and “Create Extract” from MyGSS. You will be asked to give your extract a name, add the variables you wish to include, select specific cases if you wish, and then choose to download a single year (2022) and your desired file format. It may take a minute or two to create your file, and then you will be able to download and save it to your desktop or other file storage location. 

When planning your analyses, remember that none of the individuals from the AmeriSpeak oversample were eligible to participate in the follow-on modules, so if you are planning to do comparisons by race or ethnicity, be aware of the number of cases in each group. It is always a good idea to look at the unweighted number of cases to determine whether you have an appropriate number of cases to perform your desired analyses.  

List of Variables ²

²All variables are found in section 10.221 of the 2022 GSS.