Thursday, March 14, 2013

Use of General Social Survey 2008 - Cycle 22

Question
We were contacted by a STC analyst in regards to the use of the GSS cycle 22 by the DLI community:

I would like to get a sense of who in the DLI community is accessing this data and for what purpose. Ideally, I would like to know if the data is being referenced for a research paper, data tables, qualitative analysis, etc.

While I can provide to them data access statistics from the DLI FTP/EFT, any information you can share is greatly appreciated.

Answer

I can provide three examples of use at the University of Calgary for this particular survey:

- Sociology professor is teaching an advanced statistical methods course this semester and is using this survey.

- Undergraduate sociology class has a term project to use a public use microdata file to develop a research question and then do the quantitative analysis. GSS 22 is one of the files being used by students in this class, although I don’t know what their particular research questions are. This is the second iteration of this particular research project. It is running this semester and also ran last winter.

- Sociology professor used the GSS 22 to research the characteristics of same sex friendships amongst women.

Another few more are

2012 MA Thesis, Sociology, 2012

MPA Grad(uating) Paper, 2012

Metropolis BC Working Paper Series, 2012