General Social Survey (GSS)

Origins

Two social science movements in the 1960s spawned the GSS. First, the social indicators movement stressed the importance of measuring trends and of adding non-economic measures to the large repertoire of national accounts indices. Second, scholarly egalitarianism was advocating that data be made available to scientists at all universities and not restricted to elite senior investigators at large research centers. In 1971, these ideas were presented together in a modest proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for “twenty-some questions” that called for the periodic asking of items on national samples with these data immediately distributed to the social science community for analysis and teaching. Approval from NSF plus supplemental funding from the Russell Sage Foundation spawned the first GSS in 1972.

Growth

From 1972 to 2004, the GSS conducted 25 independent, cross-sectional, in-person surveys of adults living in households in the United States, and in 1982 and 1987, it carried out oversamples of African Americans. There are a total of 46,510 respondents. During most years until 1994 there were annual surveys of about 1,500 respondents. Currently about 3,000 cases are collected in a biennial GSS.

Additionally, since 1982 the GSS has expanded internationally. The cross-national research started as a bilateral collaboration between the GSS and the Allgemeine Bevolkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissens-chaften (ALLBUS) of the Zentrum fur Umfragen, Methoden, und Analysen in Germany in 1982 and 1984. In 1984, they joined with the British Social Attitudes Survey of the National Centre for Social Research and the National Social Science Survey at Australian National University to form the ISSP. Along with institutes in Italy and Austria, the founding four fielded the first ISSP in 1985. ISSP surveys have been collected annually since that time, and there are now 41 member countries (the founding four plus Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Dominican

Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea (South), Latvia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Uruguay, and Venezuela).

Content

The GSS lives up to its title as “General.” The 4,624 variables in the 1972–2004 cumulative data set run from ABANY (legal abortion if a woman wants one for any reason) to ZOMBIES (behavioral medication for children) and have core batteries on such topics as civil liberties, confidence in institutions, crime/violence, gender roles, government spending, intergroup relations, psychological well-being, religion, and work.

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