DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03097.v1
title: British Social Attitudes Survey, 1994
title: Version 1

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 in purpose 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 1994 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 1994 self-enumerated questionnaire was devoted to a series of questions on a range of social, economic, political, and moral issues. Topics covered (by sections) are: (1) Britain's relations with other countries, (2) the role of government and civil liberties, (3) charitable giving, (4) families and children, (5) efficiency of and trust in institutions, (6) the countryside, (7) crime, (8) divorce, (9) education, (10) the environment, (11) housing, (12) the child care system, (13) health care, (14) economic issues and policies, (15) government spending, (16) taxation, (17) racial discrimination, (18) sexual behavior, (19) the death penalty, and (20) newspaper readership. Beginning in 1985, an international initiative funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), also contributed a module to the BSA. The topic of the ISSP module in this collection was the family and changing gender roles. Additional demographic data gathered included age, gender, education, occupation, marital status, household income, social class, and religious and political affiliations.
description: There is one weight variable in the data file called WTFACTOR.
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: British Social Attitudes Survey Series
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. 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., VOTERESN) 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.
description: All adults aged 18 or over living in private households in Britain whose addresses were included in the electoral registers.
description: Multistage stratified random sample consisting of four stages. From 1993 the sample was drawn from the Postcode Address File, whereas in previous years it had been drawn from the electoral register.