Survey experiment assessing UK public perceptions to social issues when presented with maps with and without personal narratives.

These are anonymized responses to a survey of 389 members of the UK public on their perceptions towards different maps about the social determinants of health. It was originally collected as part of a study described in the article 'Do personal narratives make thematic maps more persuasive? Integrating concrete examples into maps of the social determinants of health', in the Cartography and Geographic Information Science journal.The responses were collected in September 2024 on Qualtrics, via the recruitment platform Prolific.Participants were shown information on three social determinants of health (public transport, air pollution, youth services). For each topic, they were randomly shown one of three maps with varying levels of personal narratives presented. The type of map shown to each respondent can be found in columns 'transport_condition', 'pollution_condition', and 'youth_condition'. Most of the other variables refer to perceptions about those issues. For example, 'severity_pollution' refers to whether they deem air pollution a severe issue facing the country. Other variables include demographic information, chart literacy measured by four questions, and self-assessed confidence with charts.