NORC Amalgam Survey, December 1973

This data collection contains the results of a 1973 amalgam survey -- several individuals pooled resources to share the cost of launching it -- which was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. In this survey, 1,489 individuals from across the United States responded to 125 questions on a wide variety of subjects, including political and social attitudes, political party preferences, and political and social participation. One section of the survey dealt with the importance of various aspects of the respondent's life (e.g., family, job, social activities, and local, state, and national affairs) and the respondent's opinion on the importance of such social issues as marijuana, poverty, rights of criminals, government's role, school integration, pornography, medical care, neighborhood integration, defense spending, income equalization, use of troops to contain communism, government help to Blacks, spying on radicals, inflation, and government spending. In addition, respondents commented on feelings of personal efficacy, feelings about groups, confidence in institutions, views of political party candidates, jury duty experience, attitudes toward retirement and death, and family relationships (in particular, an inquiry into the relationship between brothers). The collection also includes demographic data on the respondent and his or her family (including some information about male respondents' brothers), e.g., marital status, labor force status, occupation, prestige of occupation, vote in the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, vote in local and state elections, political party affiliation, grandparent nativity, ethnicity, education, religion, respondent's family composition at age 15, number of members in current household, siblings of male respondent, age, sex, income, and race. In addition, the survey included a methodological experiment to determine the effects of the instrument and the coders on the survey results. Specifically, the survey contained question wording experiments using questions on attitudes toward government involvement with social problems and political party affiliation. A further experiment tested the accuracy of respondent-coded occupation.