General Social Survey

One is asking about whether controversial speakers should be allowed on campus.

We borrow this from the General Social Survey research by Samuel Stauffer.

So our method is borrowing from those sources, but it's effectively you ask about offensive speakers and whether they should be allowed or not allowed to come and voice their opinion.

And so some of these speakers are offensive to conservative students.

Okay, last one.

According to the data from the General Social Survey, 10% of men are sleeping with 59% of women.

Wrong.

Wrong.

So as always, hearing Colin's talk, I wasn't around last Sunday, and I was ironically cycling home from work, my pay job, listening to Colin talk about it.

It reminded me actually of a discussion I listened to on a podcast when they were talking about this survey they do in America called the General Social Survey, which is a really interesting survey.

It used to be every year, but now every second year since 1972, they ask the same questions to thousands of people in America.

And they asked loads of different questions, but one of the questions they asked was about work.

But then, yeah, I definitely started fusing this more with the demographic stuff and thinking about the issue of cultural change.

And so the simplest example of this would be something like, you know, in 1972, when the U.S. General Social Survey started, which is sort of social, which I think of as the Hubble Telescope of sociology.

Basically, it's the, you know, this survey that's been going every.

year or two since the 1970s.

And then over the years, over those 30 years, most of those people died.

And then people sort of aged into the population.

They became old enough to answer questions in the general social survey.

And they had different views.

Well, now, the short answer is that the gap is closing, and it's closing amongst younger women.

There is a survey, and it's called the General Social Survey, and they have been asking Americans about extramarital sex for decades.

And then there's the Institute for Family Studies, and they've done a lot of the heavy lifting and breaking down this data.

The headline numbers are the ones you probably already know, and that's that about 20% of married men report cheating sometime during their marital bliss, if you will.

We do have some information on retention of childhood members.

So this is from the General Social Survey of which Mormons are a very small part.

So every year there are some Mormons in this survey, but it's not a lot, so we sort of aggregate that through the decades to see what the trends are.

And the overall retention for the 1970s, 1980s was in the high 70 percents and the low 80 percents.

Yeah, good question.

So we rely on the General Social Survey for our reports of sexual frequency, and the GSS is run by the University of Chicago with money from the feds, and they've been doing this survey about every two years since 1972.

And they historically relied on in-person reports, but they've moved more in recent years to just kind of giving someone a, a computer or an iPad and having them respond to questions, um, you know- Uh, anonymously.

Um, so if anything, I would think, like, the anonymity might increase-

According to media reports, quote, the study found that anti-Jewish attitudes are at historic lows.

Jews were even perceived in the 1990 General Social Survey as leading whites in general, Southern whites, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and blacks in terms of who was regarded as harder working, richer, less prone to violence, more self-supporting, and more intelligent.

I wonder how people came to that opinion.

I wonder how 77% of the people polled could have came to that opinion.