General Social Survey (GSS)

The General Social Survey or GSS (Public Access)

The GSS takes the pulse of America, tracking opinions of Americans over the last four decades. The General Social Survey (GSS) conducts basic research on the structure and development of American society with a data-collection program including demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions for a nationally representative sample of adults.

The GSS contains a standard ‘core’ of questions, plus topics of special interest. More than 1000 people are surveyed most years from 1972 through 2016.  Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings. There are also many questions only asked one year, or asked once in the 80s and once in the 2000s. Finally, even if a question is asked in a year, it might only have been asked to a subset of people surveyed that year.

There are three kinds of data sets you can make from the GSS data.

1. You could use a cross section, using data from a single year for all of the people surveyed.

2. You could use something that has cross sections from various years, in which case you will want to think of somehow including time-related variables.  However, this would not be the same people interviewed each year.  More years means more observations and power, and also enable you to look at trends.

3. Finally, there are a few panels i.e. some people are interviewed several times in a row, as described below.  This will allow you to look at how a person changes over time, perhaps in response to something that happened the first time they were interviewed.

You can find this data by starting at: http://gss.norc.org/