General Social Survey Cumulative File, 1972-1986

Résumé 0

The General Social Survey has been conducted by the National Opinion Research Center annually since 1972 except for the years 1979 and 1981. The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research has prepared a cumulative dataset which merges thirteen years of the General Social Survey into a single file, with each year constituting a subfile. The content of each year's survey changes slightly as some items are added to or deleted from the interview schedule. The most notable addition to the 1986 wave of the survey was a group of questions related to the feminization of poverty. Respondents were asked if they had ever received income from various governmental assistance programs or from alimony or child support payments. Attitudes toward welfare were also probed through agreement or disagreement with a series of statements concerning the welfare system. On this same subject, factorial vignettes were conducted in 1986 and are included as a supplemental file to this collection. These vignettes, which describe hypothetical situations presented in brief descriptive passages, required each respondent to evaluate ten different sets of circumstances relating to family life and the need for public assistance. Seven of the vignettes related to the conditions of young families and three pertained to older women. The respondent's task was to determine whether or not the family's income should be augmented with government assistance. Each record in the supplementary file contains all the choices made by a single respondent to all ten vignettes.