DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03100.v1
title: British Social Attitudes Survey, 1997
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 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 1997 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 1997 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) politics, (5) public spending, (6) employment, (7) Europe, (8) countryside and transportation, (9) the lottery, and (10) administration. 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 work orientations. Additional demographic data included age, education, income, marital status, and religious and political affiliations.
description: There is one weight variable in the data file named 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., HOMEKEEN) 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 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 Great Britain.
description: Multistage stratified random sampling. The sample of addresses was drawn from the Postcode Address File. At each address, the interviewer established how many occupied dwelling units it contained. If there were several, one was selected at random for interview (using a Kish grid and random numbers). The interviewer then established how many adults aged 18 and older lived in the (selected) dwelling unit. If there were several, one adult was selected (using a similar procedure as that used for dwelling units). The unequal selection probabilities arising from these procedures are taken into account by the weighting.