The General Social Surveys (GSS) are representative sample surveys of the adult American population which have been conducted in almost every year since 1972. Questions on a very wide range of issues have been included, and the number of questions asked each year ranges from 153 in 1972 to over 750 in 1991. About one third of the questions make up the core, and are asked every year or most years. These are particularly useful for tracking changes in public opinion. For recent years, specially recoded variables have been added to facilitate comparisons with international data sets.
The entire General Social Survey file for 1972-1993 includes 2173 variables and occupies 71 megabytes of memory. Since a file this size is too big to work with easily, it is customary to extract a subset of data. To do this, you need to select the variables and years you want and then save them in a new file for use with your statistics package.
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