Summary information

Study title

British Social Attitudes Survey, 1983-1989

Creator

Social and Community Planning Research

Study number / PID

2824 (UKDA)

10.5255/UKDA-SN-2824-1 (DOI)

Data access

Restricted

Series

Not available

Abstract

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.BackgroundThe British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series began in 1983. The series is designed to produce annual measures of attitudinal movements to complement large-scale government surveys that deal largely with facts and behaviour patterns, and the data on party political attitudes produced by opinion polls. One of the BSA's main purposes is to allow the monitoring of patterns of continuity and change, and the examination of the relative rates at which attitudes, in respect of a range of social issues, change over time. Some questions are asked regularly, others less often. Funding for BSA comes from a number of sources (including government departments, the Economic and Social Research Council and other research foundations), but the final responsibility for the coverage and wording of the annual questionnaires rests with NatCen Social Research (formerly Social and Community Planning Research). The BSA has been conducted every year since 1983, except in 1988 and 1992 when core funding was devoted to the British Election Study (BES).Further information about the series and links to publications may be found on the NatCen Social Research British Social Attitudes webpage.The 1983-1989 collection allows exploitation of a major design feature of the series: the monitoring of trends and the assessment of the relative rates at which different sorts of attitudes evolve. The collection holds the raw data from each survey, an SPSS/PC setup file which describes these raw data for SPSS, the frequency distributions for every variable in the survey, a codebook for each file, an SPSS export file for each year and a Key Word In Context (KWIC) index of all the variable names and labels over all files. The KWIC index will help identify recurring questions for trend analyses.Main Topics:Each year, the BSA interview questionnaire contains a number of 'core' questions, which are repeated in most...
Read more

Methodology

Data collection period

01/01/1983 - 01/01/1989

Country

Great Britain

Time dimension

Repeated cross-sectional study
The BSA survey is conducted annually.

Analysis unit

Individuals
National

Universe

Adults (18 and over) living in private households in Great Britain (excluding the 'crofting counties' north of the Caledonian Canal).

Sampling procedure

Multi-stage stratified random sample
See documentation for each BSA year for full details.

Kind of data

Not available

Data collection mode

Not available

Access

Publisher

UK Data Service

Publication year

1991

Terms of data access

The Data Collection is available to UK Data Service registered users subject to the End User Licence Agreement.

Commercial use of the data and use of the data by commercial users requires approval from the data owner or their nominee. The UK Data Service will contact you.