Quantitative Datasets

Workshop data

This is a collection of six small datasets compiled from original sources to exemplify several different ways in which the “social trust” / “generalised trust” question has been asked in social surveys. The datasets are helpful for thinking through questions about concept measurement similar to those asked by Bekkers and Sandberg (2019).

The focus of the datasets is on a single country: Great Britain / United Kingdom. The original datasets have been reduced to a small number of variables: (1) respondent ID number; (2) questionnaire subsample (if relevant and available); (3) age (both numeric and categorical (7 categories) where available); (4) sex; (5) and social trust. The order of the variables in the dataset, variable names and labels, and value/category codes and labels - including missing values - were left as in the original surveys (the only exception is the gb-cls23-trust_nm dataset, where the missing values have been excluded due to the large size of the original file - over 100,000 rows - which cannot currently be opened by JASP). The datasets can be downloaded in .sav (SPSS) format and loaded directly in JASP or R.

The available datasets and their original sources are:

  • British Social Attitudes Survey 2024 (gb-bsa24-trust.sav)
  • British Social Attitudes Survey 2023 (gb-bsa23-trust.sav)
  • British Social Attitudes Survey 2010 (gb-bsa10-trust.sav)
  • Community Life Survey 2023-24 (gb-cls23-trust_nm.sav)
  • Citizenship Survey 2010-11 (gb-cs10-trust.sav)
  • European Social Survey, Round 11, 2023-24 (UK sample) (gb-ess11-trust.sav)

In their 2009 book The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) argued that the level of income inequality in the most economically developed countries is correlated with a number of social problems, reduced levels of social trust among them. They updated their analysis fifteen years later (Pickett, Gauhar, and Wilkinson 2024). Social trust is measured as a country-level percentage of those who answered that “most people can be trusted” to the classical dichotomous generalised trust question in the latest waves of the World Values Survey and European Values Study available at the time of writing. Datasets related to their analyses can be downloaded from here. The datasets allow us to replicate the analysis of the relationship between income inequality and social trust summarised in Figure 4.1 (Chapter 4: “Community life and social relations”, pp. 49-62) of Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) and Figure 7 (page 16) in Pickett et al. (2024) (see also Pickett (2024)). You can read more about the measurement of income inequality here.

pickett2009.csv pickett&al2024.sav Codebook

This dataset contains variables to replicate part of the analysis undertaken by Delhey and Newton (2005). In the article titled Predicting Cross-National Levels of Social Trust, Delhey and Newton (2005) combine various macro-level (i.e. measured at the level of nation-states) indices to test which one is a stronger predictor of the level of social trust in a society. Social trust is measured as a country-level percentage of those who answered that “most people can be trusted” to the classical dichotomous generalised trust question in the third (1995-1998) or second (1990-1994) World Values Survey or European Values Study. The other variables are taken form a great variety of sources, as detailed in Delhey and Newton (2005) and at more length in the working paper version of the article.

delhey&newton2005.sav Codebook

This dataset is the one used by Österman (2021) for the analysis underpinning the results reported in his Table 3 and related tables in the Online Supplementary Material. The aim of the article is to use information on educational reforms across European countries as a way to set up a quasi-experimental design testing the effect of education on social trust. With this approach, it aims to overcome the limitations of cross-sectional observational survey data from the European Social Survey by attempting a causal - rather than just correlational - explanation.

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This dataset contains data from the EUROMODULE (1999-2002) surveys conducted in nine countries: Germany (DE) | Austria (AT) | Switzerland (CH) | Sweden (SE) | Spain (ES) | Slovenia (SI) | Korea, Republic of (KR) | Turkey (TR) | Hungary (HU). Out of the total of 366 variables measured, only those 100 were kept in this dataset that were used by Delhey and Newton (2003) in their analysis of the various correlates of “social trust”. The value of the EUROMODULE survey data compared to other comparative surveys that measure social trust is that it offers a much greater variety of explanatory variables that allow Delhey and Newton (2003) to test the relative explanatory power of several complex social theories explaining differences in levels of social trust both at the individual level and at the macro-social level.

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This is a toy dataset derived from the European Social Survey, Round 10 (ESS10). Its aim is to be used to demonstrate several basic data transformation procedures in JASP. It contains 15 cases/observations/rows and 12 variables/features/columns (in addition to a Respondent ID variable). The cases were selected so as to include some missing values and reasonable variation across the selected variables.

The dataset should be used in conjunction with the ESS10 Questionnaire and Codebook.

This dataset is used in some of the data management example short videos available on this JASP tutorial YouTube playlist.

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Assignment data

You will use one of the datasets available below for your assignment task. These are real-life data from large-scale nationally representative surveys that include variables relating to the research questions posted on Canvas. To make the data more manageable (and because the module cannot cover some very important but more advanced topics such as clustering standard errors and multi-level modelling of cross-country data, or applying survey weights) the datasets are broken down by country and contain only a small selection of the variables available from the original surveys.

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project grew out of the European Values Study and was started in 1981. Since then it has been operating in more than 120 world societies. The main research instrument of the project is a representative comparative social survey which is conducted globally every 5 years. The datasets below come from Wave 7 (2017-2022) data, which comprised 66 countries/territories. The majority of surveys were completed in 2018-2020 with only about a dozen countries conducting their fieldwork since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in 2021-2022. The last included survey comes from India and was completed in July 2023.

You should cite the original data source in your assignments as:

Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen (eds.) (2022). World Values Survey: Round Seven. Datafile Version 5.0. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. doi:10.14281/18241.24

The European Values Study (EVS) is a large-scale, cross-national and longitudinal survey research program on how Europeans think about family, work, religion, politics, and society. Repeated every nine years in an increasing number of countries, the survey provides insights into the ideas, beliefs, preferences, attitudes, values, and opinions of citizens all over Europe. The latest (fifth) wave of the survey, EVS 2017, was conducted in 37 participating countries.

You should cite the original data source in your assignments as:

EVS (2022). European Values Study 2017: Integrated Dataset (EVS 2017). GESIS, Cologne. ZA7500 Data file Version 5.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13897.

The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted across Europe since 2001. Every two years, face-to-face interviews are conducted with newly selected, cross-sectional samples.The survey measures the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations and has been administered in 40 countries to date. ESS data collection is based on an hour-long face-to-face interview. The tenth ESS round covers 31 countries.

You should cite the original data source in your assignments as:

European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2023). ESS10 integrated file, edition 3.2 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess10e03_2

Use the search table below to quickly check what variables are available in which survey dataset. In the Search field you can search for any keyword.

References

Bekkers, René, and Bart Sandberg. 2019. “Grading Generalized Trust Across Europe.” Pp. 97–119 in Samenhang in Europa: Eenheid in verscheidenheid. Proceedings zesde Nederlandse Workshop European Social Survey, edited by S. André, G. Kraaykamp, R. Meuleman, and M. Wittenberg. The Hague.
Delhey, Jan, and Kenneth Newton. 2003. “Who Trusts?: The Origins of Social Trust in Seven Societies.” European Societies 5(2):93–137. doi: 10.1080/1461669032000072256.
Delhey, Jan, and Kenneth Newton. 2005. “Predicting Cross-National Levels of Social Trust: Global Pattern or Nordic Exceptionalism?” European Sociological Review 21(4):311–27.
Österman, Marcus. 2021. “Can We Trust Education for Fostering Trust? Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Education and Tracking on Social Trust.” Social Indicators Research 154(1):211–33. doi: 10.1007/s11205-020-02529-y.
Pickett, Kate. 2024. The Spirit Level at 15 – Technical Appendix. London: The Equality Trust.
Pickett, Kate, Aini Gauhar, and Richard Wilkinson. 2024. The Spirit Level at 15: The Enduring Impact of Inequality. Monograph. London: The Equality Trust.
Wilkinson, Richard G., and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. London: Allen Lane.