British Social Attitudes Survey, 1983-1989

The British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series began in 1983, and has been 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 behaviour in the British Election Study (BES) series held at the UKDA under GN 33066. However, for reasons of continuity, in 1997 a scaled-down BSA was also fielded in addition to the BES. Core-funding for BSA is supplemented by financial support from a number of sources (including government departments, the ESRC and other research foundations), but final responsibility for the coverage and wording of the annual questionnaires rests with the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen - formerly Social and Community Planning Research). The series is designed to produce annual measures of attitudinal movements which will complement large-scale government surveys such as the General Household Survey and the Labour Force Survey (held at the UKDA under GN 33090 and GN 33246 respectively), which deal largely with facts and behaviour patterns, as well as the data on party political attitudes produced by the polls. One of its 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. Many were also included in the Northern Ireland Social Attitudes Survey (NISA) (held at the UKDA under GN 33235) thus allowing direct comparison of the attitudes, values and beliefs held by UK citizens on either side of the Irish Sea. This analogous survey of Northern Ireland was conducted annually from 1989 to 1996, when it was discontinued. NISA has been succeeded by the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT) series (held at the UKDA under GN 33312), and the corresponding Young Life and Times Survey (YLT) series (held at the UKDA under GN 33313), which surveys young people aged 12-17 living in the households of adults interviewed for NILT. Both the NILT and YLT series began in 1998. A combined BSA dataset is available (SN 2824) which includes data from 1983 to 1989 (but not Northern Ireland data), as well as an information retrieval program and a data extraction program. In 1994, 1998 and 2003, the BSA survey was accompanied by the Young People's Social Attitudes Survey (YPSA) (held at the UKDA under GN 33338), which was designed to explore the attitudes and values of children and young people, and where possible to make comparisons with those held by adults. The sample for YPSA was drawn from young people aged 12-19 years living in the households of adults interviewed for the BSA survey. A compilation of BSA data and documentation, including interactive descriptive statistics, is available via the Britsocat web site, maintained by the Centre for Comparative European Survey Data. Further information about the series and links to publications may be found on the NatCen British Social Attitudes web page. 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:The questionnaire normally has two parts, one administered and one left for self-completion and later return. Each year the interview questionnaire contains a number of 'core' questions. These cover major topic areas such as defence, the economy, labour market participation and the welfare state. The majority of these questions are repeated in most years, if not every year. In addition, a wide range of background and classificatory questions is always included. The remainder of the questionnaire is devoted to a series of questions (modules) on a range of social, economic, political and moral issues - some asked regularly, others less often. Cross-indexes of those questions asked more than once appear in the reports. Between 1984 and 1986 the ESRC funded the introduction of a panel element into the series, enabling about half (about 700) of the first year's respondents to be re-interviewed with a slightly adapted questionnaire. Since 1985, an international initiative funded by the Nuffield Foundation, known as the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) has been running. The BSA series contributes data each year for the ISSP, and so some questionnaire modules now allow cross-national comparisons. The ISSP modules are always contained in the self-completion part of the questionnaire.