35 Years Later …
Planning for the Future of the General
Social Survey
by Roberta Spalter-Roth, ASA Research
and Development Department
Tell a group of 20-somethings, who
were sociology majors, that you have
just come back from a day-long meeting
about the future of the General Social
Survey (GSS) and to your surprise they
not only know what you are talking
about but are interested in what you
have to say. This reaction is not surprising
because the GSS, an attitudinal
survey with core questions about job satisfaction,
politics, health, racial attitudes,
religion, gender roles, standards of living,
and personal well-being, and special
modules, is among the most widely
used surveys in sociology. The survey,
conducted since 1972, is employed in
undergraduate research methods classes,
in graduate student dissertations, and
in faculty members’ books and journal
articles.
The purpose of the GSS meeting, held
May 2-3, 2007, was to gather information
for an October 1, 2007, Request for
Proposals (RFP) by the National Science
Foundation (NSF). The RFP is a “re-bidding”
of the GSS. The result may be that
the survey will no longer be conducted
by the National Opinion Research
Corporation, the organization that has
run 25 surveys with more than 46,000
respondents since the survey’s inception.
The GSS of Today
The GSS, under the direction of
Tom W. Smith, James Davis, Norman
Bradburn, and Peter Marsden, with
the advice of a Board of Overseers and
funding by the NSF Sociology Program,
has become part of the infrastructure of
the social sciences. Major changes were
made in 1993 including a reduction of
the core questions by about one-third
and the solicitation of pay-as-you-go
modules. Modules have been submitted
by prominent sociologists (including
presidents and council members of the
American Sociological Association) on
topics such as work organizations, mental
health, inter-group relations, gender,
and the information society.
An overview and history of the
content, methodology, and operations of
the survey was presented at the meeting
by the directors and by current and
past members of the Board of Overseers, including sociologists Michael Hout,
Barbara Entwisle, Suzanne Bianchi,
Mark Chavez, Steven Nock, and Robert
Mare. However, much of the discussion
focused on the future content, methods,
and operations of the soon to be re-bid
survey.
The GSS of Tomorrow
The topics discussed at the May GSS
re-bid meeting included the following:
- Changing the relations between
respondents and surveyors so that
the GSS is more interactive;
- Integrating information on individuals,
households, communities,
and society, as well as contextual
information about workplaces
and other organizations in which
individuals participate;
- Developing multi-method designs
including experiments, cohort
analysis, ethno-methodology, geomapping,
and bio-markers;
- Overcoming some current difficulties
including an out-of date-website,
hard to use data archives, and
the lack of instructional materials,
especially for students and new
users;
- Collaborating and integrating with
other surveys such as the Panel
Survey of Income Dynamics, the
General Election Survey, and the
International Social Survey; and
- Staying on the “cutting edge,” on
the frontiers of new knowledge
in order to galvanize the role of
the social sciences in the federal
government.
Several current and former members
of the Board of Overseers commented
on the difficulties of fulfilling NSF’s
demands to be cutting-edge and to
implement massive changes within the
constraints of the current NSF fundinglevel
for the survey. Several participants
called for a new funding structure that
did not include the need to raise money
through the marketing of modules.
Additional advice on re-bidding the
GSS will be solicited at a session
devoted to the topic on August 11, 2007,
from 2:30-4:10 PM at the ASA Annual
Meeting in New York City.
