DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03099.v2
title: British Social Attitudes Survey, 1996
title: Version 2

description: This survey is part of a continuing series designed to
 monitor trends in a wide range of social attitudes in Great
 Britain. The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) is similar to the
 General Social Survey carried out by the National Opinion Research
 Center (NORC) in the United States. The BSA questionnaire has two
 parts, one administered by an interviewer and the other completed by
 the respondent. As in the past, the 1996 interview questionnaire
 contained a number of "core" questions covering the major topic areas
 of defense, the economy, labor market participation, and the welfare
 state. The 1996 self-enumerated questionnaire was devoted to a series
 of questions on a range of social, economic, political, and moral
 issues. Topics covered (by section) are: (1) newspaper readership, (2)
 party identification, (3) housing, (4) electoral registration,
 politics, and political knowledge, (5) public spending, welfare
 benefits, and health care, (6) economic activity, labor market, and
 learning (including respondent's occupation), (7) scratchcards (the
 lottery), (8) social divisions, (9) political trust and Europe, (10)
 Northern Ireland, (11) taste and decency, (12) classification, (13)
 countryside, (14) transportation, (15) public understanding of
 science, (16) education, (17) local authority spending, (18)
 charitable giving, and (19) welfare/Social Security. An international
 initiative funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the International Social
 Survey Program (ISSP), also contributes a module to the BSA. The topic
 of the ISSP module in this collection was the role of government.
 Additional demographic data included age, education, income, marital
status, and religious and political affiliations.
description: [Part 2 contains one weight variable named WEIGHT17., Part 1 contains one weight variable named WTFACTOR.]
description: Multistage stratified random sampling consisting of two
 stages of selection. Prior to 1993, the sample was taken from the
 electoral register, whereas this sample was drawn from the Postcode
 Address File which is a list of addresses (or postal delivery points) 
compiled by the Post Office.
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: Respondents 18 and Older
DS2: Respondents Age 17
description: All adults aged 17 or over living in Great Britain in
private households.
description: computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI); self-enumerated questionnaire(1) In 1999, Social and Community Planning Research
 (SCPR) became the National Centre for Social Research. (2) Under
 agreement with the UKDA, the data are disseminated as they were
 received, without additional processing by ICPSR. This agreement also
 provides that ICPSR will disseminate the data only for use within its
 member institutions. Persons from nonmember institutions may request
 these data directly from the UKDA. (3) The data are provided as an
 SPSS portable file. (4) The documentation was converted to Portable
 Document Format (PDF) by the UKDA and concatenated by ICPSR.
 The PDF documentation can also be
 downloaded from the UKDA Web
 site. (5) The formats for some variables in the SPSS portable
 file (e.g., NWATTECN) are not wide enough to accommodate the missing
 value specifications. For some procedures SPSS will display these
 missing values as asterisks. Users can widen the formats to display
 the actual missing value codes. (6) The documentation contains
 information for two different studies: British Social Attitudes, 1994,
 and Northern Ireland Social Attitudes, 1994. However, only the British
 Social Attitudes dataset is provided in this collection. (7) The
 British Social Attitudes Survey series began in 1983 and was conducted
 every year since, except in 1988 and 1992 when the core funding from
 the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts was devoted to conducting
 post-election studies of political attitudes and voting behavior in
the British Election Study (BES) survey series.