Social and Political Change in Britain: Gallup Polls 1945-1991

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

How have public attitudes on key political, social and economic issues changed since the Second World War? How do those changes vary across different groups in society? From the 1930s to the early 2000s, the survey organisation Gallup conducted around three thousand surveys of the social, political and economic attitudes of the British public. At the time, these opinion polls provided valuable insights on how the public thought about key issues, personalities and events of the day - the government, the party leaders, international crises, support for specific policies, and so on - with national level results reported in monthly Gallup reports and in the news media. To date, only a small fraction of the original surveys have seen the light of day. A recent discovery by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Cornell revealed a veritable treasure trove of important historical Gallup survey data - around 2,500 surveys covering the period between 1945 and 1991 - stored in 'column binary format' based on antiquated IBM punch cards, rendering them inaccessible to most researchers today. Processing and digitising this data presents a major technical challenge, but offers the prospect of enhancing understanding of social and political change in Britain between the 1940s and 1990s. This project will develop a unique dataset that enables researchers to analyse how the major political, economic, and social shifts between the 1940s and 1990s influenced the dynamics of public opinion in Britain. It will firstly digitise all the codebooks of all Gallup surveys over the period between 1945 and 1991 (making them searchable online by researchers). It will further digitise around 700 surveys that contain questions relating to social, political and economic issues (and will specifically select 100 of these surveys through a user-led exercise enabling researchers to nominate those surveys to be prioritised for digitisation). It will also create a 'merged' dataset of individual surveys that combines repeated cross-sectional measures of public attitudes and demographics - enabling researchers to track changes in public opinion by subgroup over time. Using this new data resource, it will explore long-term trends in social and political attitudes in Britain, their reaction to key events and how they vary across different cross-sections of society.The objectives of the project are as follows:* To digitise codebooks of all surveys conducted by the UK Gallup Poll between 1945 and 1991.* To convert 700 individual surveys conducted by the UK Gallup Poll between 1945 and 1991 from column binary data to current software and non-proprietary formats.* To create a merged time series dataset based on individual surveys that offers a repeated cross-sectional measures of public opinion. * To facilitate and promote the use of this new data resource by other researchers.* To enable educational and public use of longitudinal data on public opinion through the development of web-based data visualisation tools.* To use this new data infrastructure to track and understand long-term dynamics of public opinion in Britain, especially across different groups (e.g. partisans, by age).