International Social Attitudes: The 10th Bsa Report/1993/94 (Social & Community Planning Research)

Most developed countries nowadays produce a great deal of data about their characteristics - who they are and what they do. But they generally much less information about their character - how they think and feel about their world and themselves. British social values have been charted since 1983 through SCPR's annual British Social Attitudes survey series, based on interviews with 3,000 adults nationwide. But soon it became apparent that, to identify Britain's distinctive social values, comparable data from other countries were also needed. Only then could the data reveal whether, for instance, there is an essentially British view of the world, whether national stereotypes have any basis in reality, whether and in what ways the British differ from their fellow Europeans and other nations in their social and political values. So, in 1985, SCPR joined with teams doing similar studies in other countries (now twenty others) to form the International Social Survey Programme in which each national research team devotes a small part of its annual study to an agreed module of questions on a rotating set of topics. Since then a rich dataset has been created, enabling all participating nations to learn about each other and, in the process, to discover a great deal more about themselves than would otherwise be possible. This special report presents and interprets this data, drawing on comparable surveys carried out in several countries over the last few years. As usual, the British Social Attitudes surveys, while data British data come from SCPR's annual British Social Attitudes surveys, while data from other countries come from surveys of a similar design and standard. All the datasets are publicly available to allow others to explore the results further. In common with other books in this popular series, each chapter in this book serves to replace stereotypes and unfounded assumptions with authoritative facts and figures.