Tag Archives | General Social Survey

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The General Social Survey (GSS) shows that many self-identified white adults continue to hold racial attitudes that can be regarded, collectively, as a persistent social problem. Similar to findings from the analysis of electoral surveys, the GSS also shows that these racial attitudes have more strongly predicted political behavior since 2012. However, and in contrast to group-identity interpretations of these patterns, the increase in predictive power since 2012 is attributable to a positive development: above and beyond the effects of cohort replacement, support for compensatory interventions to address black–white inequalities has increased substantially, whereas prejudice and bigotry have decreased slightly. Because these changes have been larger on the political left than on the political right, the attitudes have gained in overall predictive power.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Stephen L. Morgan: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: stephen.morgan@jhu.edu

Acknowledgments: I thank the editor and a deputy editor for their wise suggestions.

Citation: Morgan, Stephen L. 2021. “Prejudice, Bigotry, and Support for Compensatory Interventions to Address Black–White Inequalities: Evidence from the General Social Survey, 2006 to 2020.” Sociological Science 9: 1-26.
Received: November 15, 2021
Accepted: December 12, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Peter Bearman
DOI: 10.15195/v9.a1

The Rise of the Nones across the United States, 1973 to 2018: State-Level Trends of Religious Affiliation and Participation in the General Social Survey

By Parker Webservices on December 2, 2021 in Articles

Dingeman Wiertz, Chaeyoon Lim

Sociological Science December 2, 2021
10.15195/v8.a21

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Although there has been a fast rise in the share of Americans reporting no religion, it is unclear whether this trend has affected different parts of the country equally. Against this backdrop, we apply dynamic multilevel regression and poststratification (Dynamic MRP) to General Social Survey data over the period 1973 to 2018 to estimate state-level religious trends. We validate our estimates against external benchmarks, finding that they perform well in terms of predictive accuracy. Substantively, we find steeper increases in the share of religious nones in states that had more nones to begin with. Moreover, whereas state-level increases in the share of religious nones are strongly linked to declines in occasional church attendance and moderate religious identification, the associations with trends in regular attendance and strong identification are much weaker. States have thus not only diverged in their share of religious nones but also experienced different degrees of religious polarization.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Dingeman Wiertz: UCL Social Research Institute, University College London
E-mail: d.wiertz@ucl.ac.uk

Chaeyoon Lim: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin–Madison
E-mail: chaeyoon.lim@wisc.edu

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to express their gratitude to Mauricio Javier Rodriguez, Roberto Cerina, and Thees Spreckelsen for valuable advice and support. Dingeman Wiertz acknowledges support from the British Academy through a postdoctoral fellowship (grant number PF2180064).

Citation: Wiertz, Dingeman, andb Chaeyoon Lim. 2021. “The Rise of the Nones across the United States, 1973 to 2018: State-Level Trends of Religious Affiliation and Participation in the General Social Survey.” Sociological Science 8: 429-454.
Received: June 30, 2021
Accepted: July 17, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Richard Breen
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a21

A Model-Based Method for Detecting Persistent Cultural Change Using Panel Data

By Parker Webservices on March 22, 2021 in Articles

Stephen Vaisey, Kevin Kiley

Sociological Science March 22, 2021
10.15195/v8.a5

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Recent work argues that changes in people’s responses to the same question over time should be thought of as reflecting a fixed baseline subject to temporary local influences, rather than durable changes in response to new information. Distinguishing between these two individual-level process—a settled dispositions model and an active updating model—is important because these individual-level processes underlie different theories of population-level social change. This article introduces an alternative method for adjudicating between these two models based on structural equation modeling. This model provides a close fit to the theoretical models outlined in previous work. Applying this method to more than 500 questions in the General Social Survey’s three-wave panels, we find even stronger evidence than previous work that most survey responses reflect settled dispositions developed prior to adulthood.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Stephen Vaisey: Departments of Sociology and Political Science, Duke University
E-mail: stephen.vaisey@duke.edu

Kevin Kiley: Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: kevin.kiley@duke.edu

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Ken Bollen for inspiration and advice on this project.

Citation:Vaisey, Stephen, and Kevin Kiley. 2021. “A Model-Based Method for Detecting Persistent Cultural Change Using Panel Data.” Sociological Science 8: 83-95.
Received: January 4, 2021
Accepted: February 9, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a5

Reliability of the Core Items in the General Social Survey: Estimates from the Three-Wave Panels, 2006–2014

By Parker Webservices on November 14, 2016 in Articles

Michael Hout, Orestes P. Hastings

Sociological Science, November 14, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a43

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We used standard and multilevel models to assess the reliability of core items in the General Social Survey panel studies spanning 2006 to 2014. Most of the 293 core items scored well on the measure of reliability: 62 items (21 percent) had reliability measures greater than 0.85; another 71 (24 percent) had reliability measures between 0.70 and 0.85. Objective items, especially facts about demography and religion, were generally more reliable than subjective items. The economic recession of 2007–2009, the slow recovery afterward, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008 altered the social context in ways that may look like unreliability of items. For example, unemployment status, hours worked, and weeks worked have lower reliability than most work-related items, reflecting the consequences of the recession on the facts of peoples lives. Items regarding racial and gender discrimination and racial stereotypes scored as particularly unreliable, accounting for most of the 15 items with reliability coefficients less than 0.40. Our results allow scholars to more easily take measurement reliability into consideration in their own research, while also highlighting the limitations of these approaches.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Michael Hout: Department of Sociology, New York University
Email: mikehout@nyu.edu

Orestes P. Hastings: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
Email: ophastings@berkeley.edu

Acknowledgements: The National Science Foundation supported this research through its core grant to NORC for the Data Program for the Social Sciences (SES-12-60440); Hout received supplemental research support from New York University. We benefitted from comments of colleagues, especially Kenneth Bollen, Mark Chaves, the late James A. Davis, Andrew Gellman, Nora Cate Schaeffer, Judith Seltzer, Tom W. Smith, and Christopher Winship. Errors that remain are, of course, our own. Views expressed in the paper do not necessarily represent the views of the funders.

Citation: Hout, Michael, and Orestes P. Hastings. 2016. “Reliability of the Core Items in the General Social Survey: Estimates from the Three-Wave Panels, 2006–2014.” Sociological Science 3: 971-1002.
Received: August 27, 2016
Accepted: October 4, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a43

A New Conservative Cold Front? Democrat and Republican Responsiveness to the Passage of the Affordable Care Act

By Jesper Sorensen on September 16, 2015 in Articles

Stephen L. Morgan, Minhyoung Kang

Sociological Science, September 16, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a24

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Through an analysis of the 2004 through 2014 General Social Survey (GSS), this article demonstrates that the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) decreased support for spending on health among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, contrary to the conjecture that a rigid partisanship equilibrium has taken hold among voters in the United States. Instead, only a partisan deflection is present, with spending preferences declining more for Republicans than for Democrats, and with Independents in between. Through supplemental analysis of the GSS panel data, as well as comparative analysis of other GSS items on national spending preferences, government responsibility, and confidence in leaders, this article also undermines support for an alternative explanation that cannot be entirely eliminated from plausibility, which is that the identified period effect that emerged in 2010 and persisted through 2014 is a response to the Great Recession and resulting deficit spending by the federal government. Implications for public opinion research are discussed, lending support to current models of thermostat effects and policy-specific political mood from the political science literature, which are informed by an older literature on weather fronts in public opinion that originated in the sociology literature.

Stephen L. Morgan: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University Email: stephen.morgan@jhu.edu

Minhyoung Kang: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University Email: mkang25@jhu.edu

Acknowledgements: A prior version of this paper was presented at Princeton University in March 2015, and comments from seminar participants are gratefully acknowledged. We thank Peter Enns and Michael Hout for comments on the first complete draft in May 2015, and we thank the reviewer and editorial staff for their suggestions in response to our original submission in June 2015.