MathCS.org - Statistics

General Social Survey 2008 (subset)

The General Social Survey (GSS) conducts basic scientific research on the structure and development of American society with a data-collection program designed to both monitor social change within the United States and to compare the United States to other nations. The GSS data sets contain a standard ‘core’ of demographic and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest, representing the population of American adults, 18 years of age or older. More information about the GSS and its original data sets can be found at http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website/.

The original GSS data is only available in SAS and SPSS format. For your convenience, however, here are 115 variables extracted from the original GSS survey 2008 and recoded for use with a standard spreadsheet program such as Excel as well as the online stats package StatCrunch.

To load the dataset into Excel, simply click on the data set link above. To load the data set into StatCrunch for the first time, first copy (e.g. via CTRL-C) the above data set link to the clipboard (or RIGHT-CLICK and "Copy shortcut ..."). Then open StatCrunch and enter your StatCrunch user ID and password. After you are signed into StatCrunch:

When you sign in to StatCrunch the next time, you will find the data file in the "My Data" section without having to follow this procedure again. For more information on using StatCruch, check this manual.