British Social Attitudes Survey, 2001

This survey is part of a continuing series designed to monitor trends in a wide range of social attitudes in Great Britain. The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) is similar in purpose to the General Social Survey carried out by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in the United States. The main BSA questionnaire (Part 1) has two parts, one administered by an interviewer and the other completed by the respondent. As in the past, the 2001 interview questionnaire contained a number of "core" questions covering the major topic areas of defense, the economy, labor market participation, and the welfare state. The 2001 self-enumerated questionnaire was devoted to a series of questions on a range of social, economic, political, and moral issues. Topics covered are: (1) political attitudes, (2) public spending and welfare, (3) health care, (4) health and safety in the workplace, (5) national identity, (6) education, (7) drugs, and (8) transport. An international initiative funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), also contributed a module to the BSA. The topic of the ISSP module in this collection was social networks. Additional demographic data gathered included age, gender, education, occupation, household income, marital status, social class, and religious and political affiliations. The 2001 survey also produced a second data file containing information on socio-economic classifications. With the 2001 census, National Statistics changed their coding scheme of occupations from SOC90 to SOC2000. In order to assess how consistent the new coding scheme was with the old one, one third of the 2001 BSA sample (version C) was coded using both the SOC90 and the SOC2000 schemes. Part 2 of this collection contains the variables from this experiment.