News Articles

"From 2000-2010, white, married fathers ages 25 to 54 who attended church at least two to three times a month earned on average $50,900, or almost $20,000 a year more than similarly devout single men ages 25 to 54, Hollar of Marymount University found in his study using data from the General Social Survey."

"The report is based on the Survey of Consumer Finances, which is conducted every three years by the Federal Reserve, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed a group of families since 1968. It takes into account financial assets like savings accounts and retirement accounts, nonfinancial assets like business properties, and home equity minus debt."

"According to the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey in 2010, Hispanics vote at far lower frequencies than other racial and ethnic groups. For example, 52% of eligible Hispanics (that is, registered adults who are citizens) voted in the 2008 presidential election, versus 78% of non-Hispanic whites and 79% of blacks. This survey is consistent with many others."

"Wilkinson then argues that Richwine’s work was so shoddy that we can conclude he was building toward a specific conclusion rather than testing a hypothesis in good faith. But the only evidence Wilkinson has for this is the opinion of the political scientist Daniel Drezner, who wrote a scathing if vague critique after having “perused parts of” the document. And the most impressive section of the dissertation — in which Richwine breaks out data on Hispanics from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and looks to see whether IQ scores improve from generation to generation — is purely empirical."

"As the number of atheists and those claiming no-religion continues to increase across the United States, so too has the number of women who are atheists, secular humanists and freethinkers. Although women tend to still be more religious than men, according to the General Social Survey from UC Berkeley, the numbers of secular women have risen by 10% in the last twenty years."

""If there's something that's really a consensus, you are not going to find surveys asking about it," said Tom Smith, director of the giant General Social Survey since 1980. Pollsters tend to drop those questions for something new"

"The above figure displays results from males in the General Social Survey who answer yes to the proposition that they’ve watched a pornographic film over the past year. This fact was cited in my post Porn, rape, and a ‘natural experiment’, to disabuse people of the notion that porn consumption has increased radically the past generation. I was aware of this finding, and so generally am careful to focus on the quantity of porn consumed, rather than the social penetration of porn consumption. No matter what the “survey says,” the IT sector is quite aware of the fact that pornographic material is a very high fraction of internet traffic (e.g., more people check Pornhub than BBC)"

"Whether in high-rise apartment buildings or homes in the suburbs, Americans are growing more distant from their neighbors. In the 2008 General Social Survey, 30 percent of respondents said they spent a social evening with neighbors more than once a month, compared with 44 percent in 1974."

"Surveys and other primary data will be collected by NORC at the University of Chicago, Ipsos USA Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., and Market Street Research of Northampton."

"The researchers assessed intelligence based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which revealed participant scores on a battery of high school tests measuring verbal, math and arithmetic reasoning skills."

"Indeed, in a 1999 survey of nearly 3,000 adults conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, problem and pathological gamblers reported divorce rates of 39.5 percent and 53.5 percent respectively, as compared with 29.9 percent in low-risk gamblers and 18.2 percent in non-gamblers."

"Lately Kevin has been writing a bit about the South’s transition from the Democratic camp to the Republican one. I took some time today to run the numbers through the General Social Survey, a massive research project that has been underway since 1972 and whose datasets are publicly available. All of the data I use in this post are compiled in this spreadsheet."

"The economists examined U.S. Census Bureau data from 1960 through 2000. They looked at people's ages at their first marriage, completed education, occupational wages and earnings. They also used the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to measure cognitive skills and the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to evaluate physical attractiveness."

"“There is reason for optimism about the potential to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the disadvantaged,” says Dr. Gregory Wolniak, a Senior Research Scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago and the co-author of the recently released, landmark study on Horatio Alger Association National Scholarship recipients."

"A provocatively titled paper in 2009 by Jay Bhattacharya called “Does Health Insurance Make Your Fat?” found a tie between having insurance and obesity. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–which followed 12,000 teenagers over 15 years–provided the data. Bhattacharya found that teenagers’ body mass index was 2.1 points higher when they were on Medicaid and 1.3 points higher among those with commercial insurance, compared to the uninsured."

"The public isn’t quite there.  A recent public opinion poll by the Associated Press and NORC Public Affairs Research found that one-third of Americans 40 and older would rather not think about old age at all."

"According to the General Social Survey, the public has grown increasingly accepting of gay relationships since the late 1980s. That survey found in 1987 that 76 percent of Americans thought sexual relations between adults of the same sex was morally wrong. That fell to 43 percent by 2012."

"Which goals? Well, last month the General Social Survey found that, over 40 years, the fraction of American homes containing guns had slipped from 50 percent to 35 percent. That validated one of the Democrats’ gun-safety talking points—that “gun nut” culture was new, and less legitimate than hunting culture. That gun study was funded in part by the NSF. So are studies that send scientists to measure glaciers in Greenland; so was Earth: The Operator’s Manual, a 2012 documentary about climate change, for people who don’t have the time to measure glaciers."

"Bill Marsh/The New York Times; Illustrations by Luci Gutiérrez Sources: National Center for Family and Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University; National Opinion Research Center, General Social Survey. "

"What, after all, do people want from economic policy? The answer, it turns out, is that it depends on which people you ask — a point documented in a recent research paper by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright. The paper compares the policy preferences of ordinary Americans with those of the very wealthy, and the results are eye-opening"

"In fact, 3 in 10 would rather not think about getting older at all. Only a quarter predict it's very likely that they'll personally need help getting around or caring for themselves during their senior years, according to the poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research."

"That gap means most Americans are doing very little to plan and save for the assistance they'll desperately need in old age, according to a new poll from the The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research."

"The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research Poll on long-term care was conducted from Feb. 21 to March 27 by NORC at the University of Chicago. It is based on landline and cellular telephone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,019 adults age 40 or older. Interviews included 797 respondents on landline telephones and 222 on cellular phones"

"Applicants for the Harry L. Davis Executive Education Scholarship for Nonprofit Leaders must be directly responsible for shaping their organizations’ mission, policies and major programs, the school said."

"You an confirm this with the General Social Survey. The SPKATH variables asks if people should be allowed to speak against churches and religion in their communities. Below are the results by political ideology and education by respondents after 1989:"

"Most of that drop is because of plummeting earnings among those with a high school diploma or less, something that’s highly dependent on your parents. Evan Soltas examined the General Social Survey data and concluded that if your father didn’t graduate high school, you are eight times more likely not to graduate high school yourself—a 22.2 percent chance, as compared to a 2.9 percent chance among kids whose fathers did graduate."

"However, research on similar employer requirements in San Francisco and Massachusetts by the Urban Institute, National Bureau of Economic Research and the National Opinion Research Center found that the notion the requirement to provide insurance would lead to job loss or could lead to fewer employers offering health insurance was overstated."

"And yet over the past 30 years, Americans have also become less supportive of government efforts to redistribute from high- to low-income households. Between 1991 and 2010, roughly 28 percent of Americans in the General Social Survey — a continuing survey of opinions and attitudes in the United States, conducted by the University of Chicago — agreed that the federal government should “improve the standard of living of all poor Americans.” (Forty-five percent were neutral, and 27 percent agreed that “it is not the government’s responsibility, and that each person should take care of himself.”)"

"Demographic trends are working against the NRA as well. Fewer than one-third of U.S. households owned guns in 2011, down from 54 percent in 1977, according to the University of Chicago's General Social Survey."

About a third of Americans say someone in their household owns a gun, according to an AP-GfK poll. But gun ownership is declining. Back in 1977, about half of households had a gun, the General Social Survey found.

Separate studies by Harvard University and Rutgers, as well as by the National Bureau of Economic Research, have found that businesses with shared-ownership plans fared better during the recession than more traditionally structured firms, including fewer layoffs, higher productivity and stronger employee loyalty. Data from the General Social Survey, for instance, shows businesses with employee stock plans laid off workers at a rate of just 2.6% in 2010, compared with 12.1% at companies without such plans.

"For his research, Wadsworth analyzed data from the General Social Survey, which has been around since 1972."

"Places went from locally cooked product to the Mexican ice market," said Tim Mulcahy, principal research assistant of a four-year project studying methamphetamine markets across the United States. Operating without the restrictions U.S. consumers face, Mexico-based producers can buy pseudoephedrine by the barrel and ship out meth in large quantities."

"Those of us who don’t own guns are less likely to have many gun owners in our circles of friends and family, given trends in firearms ownership. Hunters, in particular, are harder to find. Federal statistics show that the number of them has fallen from its peak of 19.1 million in 1975 to 13.7 million in 2011 (with a slight uptick in recent years). Hunters make up a small subset of all gun owners, a number that has also been falling. Even as sales soar, only about one-third of US households have guns, down from about half in the 1970s, according to the 2012 General Social Survey, produced by an independent research center at the University of Chicago. Most of us are at least two generations removed from the farm, and our meat arrives in rectangular plastic-wrapped packages."

"And while the 2012 wave of the General Social Survey found overwhelming support for abortion in the case of danger to the mother’s health, rape or a chance of serious defect to the baby, majorities opposed allowing abortion “for any reason” or if the mother simply didn’t want another child."

"They will offer a lot more financial protection," Jon Gabel, the report's lead author, said of the individual plans that will be available next year. His team drew its conclusions from 2010 data supplied by health insurers.

And this is the population that isn’t saving enough to begin with. They should be saving more for distant retirement and for precautionary reasons. The figure below shows average amount median income earners had in liquid assets (savings accounts, CDs, and savings bonds) and retirement accounts since 1989 (in 2010 dollars) from the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finance:

NORC, a social science research organization at the University of Chicago, will conduct the survey through December.

A leading voice has been Dr. Ned Hallowell, a child psychiatrist and author of best-selling books on the disorder. But in a recent interview, Dr. Hallowell said that the new C.D.C. data, combined with recent news reports of young people abusing stimulants, left him assessing his role.

"Our findings clearly contradict the 'john next door' notion perpetuated by some media," Dr. Christine Milrod, who co-authored the study with Dr. Martin A. Monto, said in a press release. The researchers obtained their results by compiling data from the General Social Survey (GSS), public domain data on arrested customers and an Internet sexual services provider called The Erotic Review.

Earlier this week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she supports federal sick leave legislation. Democrats in the House and Senate have proposed the “Healthy Families Act,” which, according to the text of both bills, would require employers “to permit employees to earn up to 56 hours of paid sick time including paid time for family care.” In a 2010 poll, the National Opinion Research Center found that 86% of respondents supported mandatory paid sick leave legislation.

The survey is being conducted by NORC, the social science research group at the University of Chicago, through the end of the year.

That's according to a new study, "Gender, Debt, and Dropping Out of College," published in a recent issue of the journal Gender & Society. The researchers, three professors from Ohio State University and Pacific Lutheran University, analyzed data from a national longitudinal study of youth from 1997 to 2011, funded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that included interviews with about 9,000 men and women in their 20s.

Americans are not giving up on God (only about 3 percent are atheists). But a growing number are turning away from organized religion. According to a recent survey, 20 percent say they have no religious preference at all. In 1990 that figure was only 8 percent; in 1972 it was 5 percent. Sociologist Mike Hout at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues call this group the “unchurched.” And in some respects detailed analysis of the data from the General Social Survey conducted every two years by the National Opinion Research Center is predictable. They found, for instance, that 40 percent of liberals are unchurched, but only 9 percent of conservatives. More than a third of the 18-to-25 crowd is without a religion. One can speculate about the reasons for this overall trend, including public disappointment with repeated scandals that expose the hypocrisy, or worse, of moralizing evangelists, ministers, imams, rabbis, gurus, and, of course, priests. Although 35 percent of Americans were raised Catholic, only 25 percent say they still consider themselves Catholic. The next survey in 2014 may show us whether a new generation of religious leaders—and a new pope in Rome—have changed these trends.

According to General Social Survey data, 62 percent of Jews and 52 percent of Asians born between 1950 and 1970 have at least a bachelor’s degree. That compares with 23 percent of the same age group in the general population.

We Chicagoans respect and admire the city's schoolteachers and, like teachers, we want to be sure every child receives the education he or she needs to succeed in college, career and life. That's the critical finding in a new poll conducted by the Joyce Foundation and the Chicago Tribune in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent research organization. NORC surveyed 1,010 Chicagoans, including 520 parents with children in Chicago public schools. The results show Chicagoans support efforts to improve teacher quality and ensure that every child is learning in every class.

This is an exploratory venture for Joyce and for the Tribune: The mutual goal is to gauge Chicagoans' attitudes about their city's schools and how to improve them. To carry out the survey, the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago conducted telephone interviews with 1,010 Chicagoans — 520 parents of Chicago public school students and 490 other Chicagoans — who were asked to grade the schools and weigh in on how they would suggest boosting academic performance.

In fact, according to National Opinion Research Center data going back to 1988, each generation has grown more supportive of gay marriage as it has aged. Just 25 percent of baby boomers backed legalizing gay marriage in 2004, but that number had risen to 43 percent in 2012. Ditto Gen X’ers — 37 percent of whom backed gay marriage in 2004 and 53 percent who said the same in 2012.

Some 33% of respondents reported having a gun in their home or garage, an estimate that's consistent with recent data from the General Social Survey and other surveys,4,5 though somewhat lower than a few 2013 polls have reported. Twenty-two percent of respondents identified the guns as personally belonging to them (“gun-owners”), and 11% identified themselves as non–gun-owners living in a household with a gun. Among gun-owners, 71% reported owning a handgun, 62% reported owning a shotgun, and 61% reported owning a rifle. The remaining 67% of respondents identified themselves as non–gun-owners living in households without guns (“non–gun-owners”).

Dr. Felicia LeClere, a Principal Research Scientist with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), describes her work. NORC is a nonprofit research organization that collects data and does analysis of America’s attitudes toward social and health issues; it does not do political polling. The survey results are distributed to the parts of the federal government, such as Congress or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that need such information to make informed decisions and to better serve the public interest. Each question posed to the public gives people the opportunity to respond negatively or positively. The intention is to improve public policy in fields such as health, education, economics, crime, justice, energy, security, and the environment.

Referring to the General Social Survey's finding last year that 34% of households have guns, down from percentages in the mid-40s in the early 1990s, Dr. Kellermann, an emergency physician, said, "Is it really 34%, or are there 10% of people out there who told the survey researcher 'no' but they have an assault rifle in the closet? That's a question I can't give you the answer to.

A new survey highlights another gap between many employers and lower paid workers. As they struggle to get ahead, many employees who earn less than $35,000 a year are not taking advantage of job training or educational programs that could help them make the leap to a better-paying job. A survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that many workers are skeptical about whether training programs are worth the trouble. While 83 percent of employers said job training is extremely or very important for upward mobility, only half of low-wage workers agreed.

In many cases, workers in low-wage positions are not using the training programs their employers offer because they don't even know they exist, the two-part AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of both workers and employers found. Two-thirds of employers said they offer coaching or mentoring programs and 61 percent provide on-the-job training. But only 36 percent of low-wage workers reported that their employers offer such programs.

As a workforce sector, those earning $35,000 or less annually are generally pessimistic about their finances and career prospects. Many see themselves as worse off now than during the recession, a two-part Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of workers and employers shows.

The new figures came from the 2011 to 2012 National Survey of Children's Health, a national telephone survey conducted by the CDC. In this most recent survey, parents reported that 2 percent of 6- to 17-year-olds had a diagnosis for an autism spectrum disorder, which is higher than the 2007 estimate of 1.16 percent.

The AP survey was conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago. Harvard economist George Borjas projects that by 2030, the children of today's immigrants will earn on average 10 percent to 15 percent less than nonimmigrant Americans, based on past trends, and that Latinos will particularly struggle because of high rates of poverty, lack of citizenship and lower rates of education. In 1940, the children of early 20th-century white ethnics fared much better on average, earning 21.4 percent more than nonimmigrants.

Is Climate Change Your No. 1 Environmental Concnern? The University of Chicago asked people in 33 countries. Here's how many said yes.

The situation is not so ideal today. Like values, and the quality of music, and the modesty of women, religion is on the decline in This Great Nation. A new survey out of UC Berkeley finds that "Religious affiliation in the United States is at its lowest point since it began to be tracked in the 1930s." (Theoretically it could have been lower at some point before the 1930s, but hating god has only been "cool" since the invention of the demon "jazz," so it's doubtful.) A full 1/5 of Americans now report no religious affiliation at all—not even with easy, entry-level cults like Mormonism, or Islam. Who is most to blame, my lord?

(These data are from the General Social Survey. Why look only at the 30-plus? Because people typically do not settle their religious affiliations until they have settled down, marrying and having a child. The age at which Americans do that has gotten notably older in the last 40 years, so I just focus on respondents past their twenties. By the way, for the latest numbers on Americans claiming no religion, see pdf.)

The study notes that the trend of people stating no religious preference has been growing since the General Social Survey began asking about it in the early 1970s, when only five percent of people said they had no religion. However, the irreligious category has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. In 1990, only eight percent of respondents said they were not religious, compared to 20 percent when the study was conducted last year.

The percentage of Americans who declared "no religious preference" on the 2012 General Social Survey, a large-scale national survey, was more than twice the percentage of Americans who declared no religion in 1990, and four times higher than the percentage in 1972, the first year the survey was taken.

That's according to new analysis of the General Social Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The analysis found that in 2012, only about 27 percent of American Catholics called themselves "strong Catholics;" that's a down more 15 points since the mid-1980s and among the lowest level since the GSS started asking the question 38 years ago.

One of the most deeply informed analyses of this issue comes from Pat Ruggles, a senior fellow at the independent research group NORC at the University of Chicago. She shared her personal thoughts in an email to the Times:

Pew’s finding that 37% of adults say that someone in their household owns a gun closely matches the percentage found in 2012 by the General Social Survey, a large-scale academic research project of the independent research organization NORC. The data from the General Social Survey, which is taken every two years, have shown a steady decline in the percentage of households owning a gun since the early 1970s, when the survey first began to ask the question. Pew’s data also show a decline; in the 1993 Pew survey, 45% of adults said that someone in their household owned a gun.

The General Social Survey -- conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, NORC, at the University of Chicago -- polled about 2,000 people from March to September in 2012. The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Times analyzes data from the General Social Survey, carried out by a research center at the University of Chicago, for its findings, but not everyone agrees. Gallup, for example, shows a higher ownership rate and a much smaller drop, with 43 percent of Americans reporting having a gun in their home last year, compared to 50 percent in 1968. The NRA also expresses skepticism that there has been such a steep decline.

In light of International Women’s Day, I wanted to re-visit these findings and check in with all of you about women, happiness, and all that has been achieved since 1972, the first year the United States General Social Survey (GSS) began asking men and women, “How happy are you?”

The gun ownership rate has fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s, according to data from the General Social Survey, a public opinion survey conducted every two years that asks a sample of American adults if they have guns at home, among other questions.

The newly released General Social Survey asked people whether they believe spending in specific categories is "too much," ''too little" or "about right." It covers the public's shifting priorities from 1973, when Richard Nixon was president, through 2012 with Obama in the White House.

Health information exchange is the next step in putting EHR data to good use, but many state and local initiatives are struggling with the vast infrastructure requirements and the lack of interoperability, which are hindering the seamless flow of patient data from one provider to the next.  In a web presentation at HIMSS13, Lauren Hovey, MA and Prashila Dullabh, MD, Director of Health IT at NORC at the University of Chicago, examined the HIE implementation methods of five states in order to provide an example to those still searching for a way to get their HIEs off the ground.

The author of "Street Dreams: The Effect of Incarceration on Illegal Earnings," Hutcherson based his findings on analyzing eight years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Last year, researchers at the University of Washington Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors who analyzed data on infidelity taken from the General Social Survey found that roughly 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under age 35 copped to cheating on their spouses in 2006 (the latest figures available), up from 15 and 12 percent, respectively, 15 years earlier.

The prestigious National Opinion Research Center (NORC), located at the University of Chicago, just released a report on what it calls “priority worries”. Given a list of 8 “problems”, only 3.6 per cent of Americans rank “Environment” as their highest priority. Within a sub-list of seven environmental “problems”, 19.6% rate climate change as “extremely dangerous”, where it ranks fourth out of the seven.

Thanks to a large-scale study published in late 2009, we know a good deal about the sex lives of adults 50 and older. The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) asked anything and everything about the sexual habits, interests and attitudes of nearly 3,000 adults as old as 85 years old. Principal Investigator Linda Waite and her team from the University of Chicago devised interviews and paper-and-pencil questionnaires that asked participants to open up about many sensitive aspects of their personal lives.

Despite the criticism, broad public support exists for some of the changes the first lady and the mayor are advocating, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

In October 2012, Goldman published a closely related paper in Public Opinion Quarterly arguing “that the Obama campaign produced a significant and substantive decline in white racial prejudice.” Goldman compared the relatively sharp decline in prejudice during the last six months of the 2008 Obama campaign with the much slower reduction in prejudice over the previous 20 years, as measured by public opinion data from the American National Election Studies, the General Social Survey and the National Annenberg Election Study.

That doesn't mean more folks from each demographic were buying guns, however. In 1977, the University of Chicago's nationwide General Social Survey showed that 54% of American households reported owning guns. By 2010, the last time the survey data was compiled, reported gun ownership fell to 32%. A 2011 Gallup survey suggested that 23% of U.S. women owned guns, though the General Society Survey says that number is closer to 10%.

They were "the first and only surveys that put long-term attitudes toward environmental issues in general and global climate change in particular in an international perspective," said Tom W. Smith of the NORC, formerly the National Opinion Researcher Center, at the University of Chicago, author of a paper that summarizes the surveys.

The study, which involved 83 interviews (37 percent response rate) of wealthy Chicago residents in winter and spring 2011, conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, indicated 87 percent of the wealthy call budget deficits a "very important" problem, with a third saying it was the most important, followed by unemployment and education (84 percent saying they were "very important"). Only 26 percent called inflation "very important" and 16 percent cited climate change.

This has been the case for decades. Rates peaked way back in the 1970s, the era of disco balls and bell bottoms. In 1977, 54 percent of American households reported owning guns. In 2010, the last time the General Social Survey data was compiled, the percentage had shrunk to 32.

THIS week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classic today are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political proposals to change the status of women. But “The Feminine Mystique” had the impact it did because it focused on transforming women’s personal consciousness.

The number of Americans owning guns has declined for decades, especially in a younger generation that has less military or hunting experience than its predecessors. About 12 percent of adults under 35 keep a gun at home, less than half the rate for their elders, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

An increase in sexual activity is a strong predictor for happiness, according to the data analysis of the General Social Survey, funded by the National Science Foundation. Happiness increases with frequency of sex, even among those over 65, according to Adrienne Jackson, an assistant professor of physical therapy at Florida A& M University.

In a TV comedy intended to provide plenty of shock value, such a far-fetched scene is intended to push all of our buttons, and if you haven’t seen it, just hearing about it probably pushes a few of yours. The fact is, however, that people continue to have sexual relationships for their entire adult lives. The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) was conducted on a large national sample of adults 57 to 85 years of age. As described in an extensive article by Principal Investigator Linda Waite of the University of Chicago (2009), the study was intended to test the hypothesis that older adults with strong sexual and intimate relationships would have more favorable health in general. They defined sexuality as reflecting a combination of physical ability, motivation, attitudes, opportunity, and actual sexual behavior.

At first glance, the Catholic Church appears to be healthy in the United States: According to data from the National Opinion Research Center, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves Catholic has held steady since 1972 at around 25.5 percent. But that finding masks the fact that many Americans have left the faith, as part of what appears to be a growing movement away from organized religion. In a broad 2007 survey, Pew found that "one-third of the survey respondents who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic." (Cooperman notes that roughly one in 10 Americas identify as former Catholics.) One major reason that the Catholic population in America has held steady is that the nation's Latino population has exploded, and 58 percent of Latinos identify as Catholic. By some estimates, 80 percent of the America Catholic population will be Latino by 2050, according to Baylor University history professor Philip Jenkins, who studies global Christianity.

The marketing effort may have fizzled, according to data compiled as part of the University of Chicago's General Social Survey. In 1982, almost 16 percent of women owned guns, the survey showed. By 2010, it had gone down to less than 10 percent.

A 2011 Gallup survey put the number of women who reported personally owning a gun at 23 percent, as opposed to 46 percent of adult men — 10 percent more than they measured two years prior. Nevertheless, according to an aggregate five-year study from Gallup, men are three times more likely than women to own a gun. A recent General Social Survey put the number of women gun owners closer to one in ten.

Supporting the Tesler-Sears findings, Josh Pasek, a professor in the communication studies department at the University of Michigan, Jon A. Krosnick, a political scientist at Stanford, and Trevor Tompson, the director of the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, use responses from three different surveys in their analysis of “The Impact of Anti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama’s Job Performance and on Voting in the 2012 Presidential Election.”

The data in the Wright study comes from the General Social Survey, which is a series of longitudinal data collected in the US since 1972 (current dataset ends at 2006). It is conducted through in-person interviews by the National Opinion Research Centre at the University of Chicago, of a sample of adults who are not institutionalised. As of 2010, the data pool consists of about 55,000 respondents with over 5,000 data variables collected.

This means that gun ownership has gotten much more concentrated among fewer households: if you own one gun, you probably own several. America has the highest rate of gun ownership of any country in the world, by a wide margin (see: international comparison). (More: A long running poll by Gallup; the wide-ranging General Social Survey; aNew York Times demographic breakdownby Nate Silver)

Some 33% of respondents reported having a gun in their home or garage, an estimate that's consistent with recent data from the General Social Survey and other surveys,4,5 though somewhat lower than a few 2013 polls have reported. Twenty-two percent of respondents identified the guns as personally belonging to them (“gun-owners”), and 11% identified themselves as non–gun-owners living in a household with a gun. Among gun-owners, 71% reported owning a handgun, 62% reported owning a shotgun, and 61% reported owning a rifle. The remaining 67% of respondents identified themselves as non–gun-owners living in households without guns (“non–gun-owners”).

Gun ownership has fallen sharply from 54 percent of U.S. households in 1977 to 32 percent in 2011, according to the University of Chicago's General Social Survey. In that context - and amid calls for new restrictions on guns - it's important for the NRA to show that its membership is rising, said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control group.

Attending a sober Super Bowl party, like the one the Salvation Army threw for recovering addicts and the public, is an important step for people with past addictions, said Eric Goplerud, senior vice president of Substance Abuse, Mental Health and Criminal Justice Studies at NORC at the University of Chicago.

The General Social Survey—a biennial poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, a well-respected, independent research organization—finds that under certain circumstances, people have become slightly less willing to accept women having abortions. In the 1990s, for instance, 83 percent of Americans, on average, felt it was all right for abortions to take place after a woman had been raped; in the 2000s and 2010, that number fell to 78 percent. Similarly, in the ’90s, 45 percent of Americans would have allowed abortions for pregnant women who did not want to marry the father, but now just 42 percent would. Members of every generation have become a little more conservative about abortion than they were 10 years ago, says Clyde Wilcox, PhD, a professor of government at Georgetown University and a coauthor of Between Two Absolutes, an analysis of abortion attitudes.

Donald T. Hutcherson II, a sociology professor at Ohio University in Lancaster, recently decided to tackle the question by mining the vast data in the U.S. government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

More recent studies on married couples and sexuality roughly match up in terms of the number of sexual encounters. A 2005 study by NORC at the University of Chicago found that married couples have sex on average about 66 times per year, slightly more than once per week. Interestingly, the survey’s director, Tom Smith, points out that despite all the humorous anecdotes suggesting otherwise, married couples have sex more frequently than their single counterparts.

Sara Konrath, Ed O'Brien and Linda Hagen all of the University of Michigan, Daniel Gruhn at North Carolina State University analyzed data on 75,000 U.S. adults from three separate large samples of American adults, two from the nationally representative General Social Survey

Using various social welfare models and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, Troshkin found that an optimal policy would have generally moderate levels of capital income taxation and that in all cases the overall economic welfare gains from introducing optimal capital income taxes are small.

I recently had dinner with old friends who worked with me at one of the many research shops on my résumé. They both went on to finish Ph.D. programs and now teach at good midlevel state universities that are working hard to retain their graduate programs. One of the institutions has an applied master’s degree in social science and the other has a functioning Ph.D. program that provides sociology professors for regional small colleges, but is being undercut by a waning interest in academic careers.

A second answer brings to surface the insidious moralisms of weight-loss. In early January the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago released results from their survey of 1,011 adults in late 2012 on their perception of obesity. When asked to assess the obesity epidemic, 64 percent of respondents identified "People don't want to change" as a major reason. On another question, 52 percent agreed that maintaining a healthy weight is "... something individuals should deal with on their own." Still another question showed only 22 percent believed the food industry had a "very large amount of responsibility" for solving the country's obesity problems. The blame for obesity rests with individual failing, not corporate strategy.

Fredrickson's unconventional ideas are important to think about at this time of year. With Valentine's Day around the corner, many Americans are facing a grim reality: They are love-starved. Rates of loneliness are on the rise as social supports are disintegrating. In 1985, when the General Social Survey polled Americans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 2004, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.

The General Social Survey (GSS) has been asking the same battery of question on the legality of abortion since the early 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s, young adults were significantly more “pro-choice” than average. However, surveys taken between 2000 and 2006 show that the Millenials are actually the most pro-life demographic cohort. An additional survey taken by the Polling Company this summer found that young people often feel more comfortable restricting abortion in certain circumstances than older Americans do.

Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.

Recently, the Horatio Alger Association, which supports low-income students, commissioned a study of the causes and effects of resilience. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, examined the attitudes and behaviors of students who had received the scholarship. It identified specific characteristics of highly resilient students, such as their tendency to "reframe" adversity as a positive challenge instead of a crippling defeat. The results will inform the selection of future scholarship recipients, according to Ms. Hauser.

... analyzed existing data sets including the General Social Survey, National Survey on the Moral and Spiritual ...

Data from the U.S. Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances and the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, indicates 30 percent of households with incomes of less than $50,000 per year had cashed out a retirement plan before retirement, a report by consulting firm HelloWallet found.

Whether this model works to lower obesity rates remains to be seen. Consider that 65 percent of people in the AP-NORC poll identified a major reason for the obesity problem as a straightforward one: People don't want to change. Americans have to make the personal decision to live healthier lives or they'll simply ignore the resources available.

While reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angles of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, I came across this, “today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals” (page 476). I decided to see if Pinker was correct. I used data from the General Social Survey (GSS). I chose issues Pinker wrote about in that chapter, Chapter 8: The Rights Revolution.

Indeed, for all the cries of anti-weight prejudice, there is evidence that most Americans underestimate the dangers of obesity. In a recent Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center study, most Americans knew that obesity was associated with high risk of heart disease and diabetes, but fewer than 10 percent were aware that it is also related to higher risk of cancer, respiratory problems and infertility.

Using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of Income and Program Participation, conducted by the Census Bureau, the report said 30 percent of households earning less than $50,000 a year had cashed out a retirement plan for non-retirement purposes. Only 12 percent of households earning between $100,000 and $150,000 a year and 8 percent of those earning more than $150,000 a year have cashed out a retirement account, the report said.

More broadly, older people continue to have the nation's highest homeownership rates. According to the Federal Reserve Board's 2010 Survey of Consumer Finance, here are the percentages of families owning their primary residences by age, for both 2010 and 2007:

But herein lies the problem with the NRA's claim that it has real Americans on its side. According to a University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center survey, 32 percent of households have guns. According to Gallup, 47 percent of Americans say they have a gun in their home. That means the NRA doesn't even theoretically represent a majority of Americans. But it doesn't even represent a majority of gun owners, or even a third of gun owners. There are 312 million people living in America, meaning that if the Gallup poll is accurate, there are 146 million gun owners, and the NRA's membership amounts to just 2.9 percent of gun owners. That's even though membership is only $25, comes with a one of three free gifts (bizarrely, one of them is a knife), and a little bumpersticker looks cool on your car.

Solving this nation’s most pressing health problem is more than any other single factor critically dependent on individual responsibility. While the AP-NORC survey underscored awareness of personal responsibility in a general sense, the list of nine options selected as possible causes of obesity shockingly failed to include the most obvious culprit of all –overeating! Check out what’s on the table in front of the fat people the next time you walk by a restaurant – feel free to let me know how often it is only a half-sandwich, a salad, or some other healthful alternative to what I usually notice when I take a casual look.

Carrying too many pounds may lead to or worsen some types of cancer, arthritis, sleep apnea, even infertility. But a new poll suggests few Americans realize the links. Only about one-quarter of people think it's possible for someone to be very overweight and still healthy, according to the poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

In a series of surveys in the 1980s and 1990s, around 34 percent of people consistently described themselves in that manner. But that number decreased to 28 percent in a 2009 University of North Florida survey, and in the 2010 round of the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, it was down to 25 percent.

This news is not entirely new, it turns out. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which has been conducting a General Social Survey of 1,400 American adults since 1972, compared responses from 1985 to 2004 and discovered that, on average, each person had 2.94 close friends with whom they could discuss important matters in 1985, and by 2004 their number of close confidantes had decreased to 2.08. In the Chicago study, people who responded that they had no one with whom to discuss important matters more than doubled during this period, to nearly 25 percent.

That’s basically the finding of a new Associated Press poll, which reveals we’re concerned about the country’s growing waistlines, though deeply divided on exactly what — if anything — the government should do about it.

Most draw the line at policies that would try to force healthier eating by limiting food choices, according to the poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. A third of people say the government should be deeply involved in finding ways to curb obesity, while a similar proportion want it to play little or no role. The rest are somewhere in the middle.the

Even as gun purchases rise, the share of U.S. households with a gun has been falling for decades, from 54 percent in 1977 to 32 percent in 2010, according to the University of Chicago's General Social Survey.

The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey (GSS) found 15 percent of all marriages are essentially sex-less, with no sex over the past six months to a year, said WCCO-TV.

Researchers used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which included a group of 8,984 adolescents born from Jan. 1, 1980 through Dec. 31, 1984. The survey asked questions about drug, alcohol and gun use, as well as arrests, thefts and other behaviors.

To explore the subject, the investigators cross-referenced unemployment statistics between 1980 and 1982 (a time of recession) and data collected by the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 concerning nearly 9,000 adolescents who were born between 1980 and 1984.

“The proportion of households with a firearm has declined from about half in the 1970s to about a third now,” said Tom W. Smith, senior fellow at NORC, an opinion research center at the University of Chicago, and director of the Center for Study of Politics and Society. “That surprises a lot of people. But when you look at two ancillary facts: the proportion of adults who are hunters has declined, and most years the levels of crime has declined. Hunting and self-defense are the two major reasons for having firearms, and both of those trends point away from having firearms.”

"As the 2012 presidential election campaign reached its final weeks, we designed this survey to find out what Americans think about the policy issues that the president and new Congress will face, including the fiscal cliff, and what course of action they think we should take to deal with it," said Kirk Wolter, Senior Fellow and Executive Vice President, Survey Research with NORC at the University of Chicago. "We found that a majority of Americans overwhelmingly prefer that their own representatives in D.C. work with others and make compromises, even compromises that include policies that they dislike."

Thus, about 35 percent of Americans had a gun in their house—a number, incidentally, much lower than in an October, 2011 Gallup poll but more in line with data from the General Social Survey.

Pointing to data from the University of Chicago's General Social Survey, Sugarmann says that while 54 percent of American households owned a gun in 1977, only 32.3 percent did in 2010.

Here's something you may not realize: Gun ownership has been declining for decades. According to the University of Chicago's General Social Survey, in 1977, 54% of American households had guns. By 2010, the number had fallen to 32%. Yet gun sales are at record highs. That means that existing gun owners are buying more and more guns. It's not enough to have a hunting rifle over your mantle; you need an entire arsenal, just in case the government falls, society disintegrates, and you have to protect your cave -- sorry, your home -- from the marauding hordes.

Glass and Noonan looked at nearly 67,000 workers using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and at data from the U.S. census. The study is especially meaningful because Noonan and Glass could evaluate information on the same groups of workers from high school until they reached their early 50s. This allowed them to look at changes over time and to see whether the promise of telecommuting started to develop.

The percentage of households with firearms has fallen from 54 percent in 1977 to 32 percent in 2010, according to the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Tom W. Smith, who directs the General Social Survey conducted by the research organization.

A separate review by the General Social Survey, part of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, has tracked a slow decline in the portion of Americans who own guns, from 29% in 1980 to about 21% in 2010.

Today, the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago released new survey results, 2012 NORC Presidential Election Survey: Americans' Views on the Deficit. Results from the survey suggest that a large majority of Americans are more concerned about jobs and unemployment than they are about the budget deficit. And not surprisingly, Republicans and Democrats have somewhat different budget priorities, yet a clear majority of Americans (79 percent) want their representatives in Washington D.C. to work with others to get things done.

There’s a name for those gun buyers: Republicans. As the FiveThirtyEight blog noted Tuesday, the 2010 General Social Survey showed that 50 percent of adult Republicans owned guns, while only 22 percent of adult Democrats did. This gap in gun-ownership rates has swelled over the past 40 years: In the 1973 survey, 55 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats had a gun at home. Polls suggest this gap will continue to widen: In the 2008 national exit polls, the percentage of Democrats with guns declined as the age cohorts grew younger, while the GOP rate of gun ownership was the same across all age groups. Increasingly, then, it’s our shrinking Republican minority that is buying guns.

Help reframe the problem. “Even if dementia is involved, let them know it’s not that their partner hates them, it’s that he is having cognitive changes,” said Dr. Linda Waite, director of the Center on Demography and Economics of Aging at NORC/University of Chicago.

Gun ownership has declined over the past 40 years — but almost all the decrease has come from Democrats. By 2010, according to the General Social Survey, the gun ownership rate among adults that identified as Democratic had fallen to 22 percent. But it remained at about 50 percent among Republican adults.

The percentage of gun-owning households has fallen since 2004 to 32 percent in 2010, according to the General Social Survey by NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey indicates at least 1.8 firearms per household, or at least 70 million in households nationwide, said Tom Smith, the survey’s principal investigator.

There are a few problems with this. First, I'm not sure where NR got its data on how many families own guns (Update: perhaps this Gallup poll), but according to University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, it's 32 percent of households. Second, there is a regional divide about gun control, it's not as stark as it sounds. Stricter gun laws are the least popular in the South, but a full 46 percent of southerners support them.

Using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth it is possible to control for these and other differences between college grads and the rest of us. Once you control for both the risk of not graduating from college and differing personal characteristics, the earnings boost attributable to college attendance is cut in half. Looking at data that includes people from a wider age range confirms these results. Treating the entire wage gap between high school and college graduates as if it's due to going to college significantly overstates the financial benefits of attending college.

Decreasing: The number of Americans who own guns. John Sides posts the graph at right, based on data from Gallup and the General Social Survey, showing the decline.

But public opinion looks much different when you ask people specific questions. Polls show that majorities of Americans favor almost every restriction actually being proposed to set limits on gun ownership. For example, the General Social Survey has long found three-quarters of Americans saying everyone should have to get a permit from the local police before buying a gun. A Times/CBS News poll last year found 63 percent of Americans in favor of a ban on high-capacity magazines.”

In 1988, 15 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds — the age of baby boomers at the time — supported same-sex marriage, according to the General Social Survey, which is financed by the National Science Foundation. Now, among 18- to 34-year-olds — the millennials — 63 percent do.

“For all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows,” writes political scientist Patrick Egan. The decline is most evident on the General Social Survey, though it also shows up on polling from Gallup, as you can see on this graph:

The perception that the country is divided over values is not new, however. Polls sponsored by the General Social Survey and The Washington Post between 1993 and 1998 found views similar to those of today, with more than six in 10 Americans then saying the country was divided over values, versus roughly a third saying it was united.

Finally, gun ownership in the US is already on the decline. In the 1970s, about half of US homes had firearms, according to the long-running General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. Today only about one-third do.

The LA Times points out that gun ownership is dropping in the United States. CNN said, “The number of households owning guns has declined from almost 50% in 1973 to just over 32% in 2010, according to a 2011 study produced by The University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. The number of gun owners has gone down almost 10% over the same period, the report found.” But at the same time, those who own guns sometimes own a lot of them. By some estimates, 20 percent of gun owners own 65 percent of the guns in America.

This racial difference between whites and non-whites is evident in attitudes about race. Here, too, it appears the tide is going out on Republicans decade by decade. On the question of whether there should be a ban on interracial marriages, over time attitudes have become sharply more liberal among all age groups, though, as might be expected, younger Americans are far more liberal. According to the General Social Survey, in 1972, 43 percent of Americans over 26 were in favor of a ban on interracial marriages, while just one in five of those aged 18 to 25 were in favor. Thirty years later opposition to interracial marriage had declined to 10 percent and 4 percent, respectively. The survey showed a near-identical change in attitudes toward racial segregation of neighborhoods. Each generation has become more liberal on issues of race, with baby boomers (born 1946 to1964) and the Generation Xers (born 1965 to 1976) barely racist at all.

Lead author Jennifer Glass, professor in the Department of Sociology and the Population Research Center, and her team relied on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the U.S. Census Bureau’s to analyze telecommuting trends.

For decades, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has been conducting something called the General Social Survey, the general idea being to find out "what people think about various stuff right now." It generates interesting data over a long time span, but the questions themselves are pretty boring: what's your income, do you go to church, do you give money to charity, that sort of thing.

Previous studies have shown seniors tend to have quite positive outlooks -- especially compared with younger adult generations -- despite the physical and cognitive decline associated with old age. A 2008 analysis of data from the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center indicated that about half of U.S. residents in their late 80s report being very happy, while the figure for younger adult age groups sinks to a third or less. And study of almost 45,000 German adults from 1984 to 2007 found that happiness levels dip during middle age but rebound by about age 60.

Professor Jennifer Glass, a professor in the Department of Sociology and the Population Research Center, looked at two data sources ( the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 panel and special supplements from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey) to analyze trends in telecommuting across the entire U.S. civilian workforce. The results overwhelmingly indicate that, rather than alleviating the stress and longer hours of commuting in and out of the office, working from home causes work to seep into home life.

The research, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 panel and the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, shows that telecommuting causes work to seep into an employee's home life. The study points to a 2008 Pew Networked Workers survey that revealed employees use technology, especially email, to perform work tasks even when sick or on vacation.

They analyzed more than 2,700 respondents to the 2002 General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and generally considered one of the primary sources of data on American social trends.

To reach these findings, Schwadel modeled data from almost 40,000 respondents to the General Social Survey, from 1974-2010, said Steve Smith, the university’s national news editor.

Using two nationally representative data sources — the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 panel and special supplements from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey — Glass and her colleague, Mary Noonan, associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, analyzed trends in the use of telecommuting among employees and employers in the U.S. civilian workforce.

Over 30+ years, the General Social Survey (GSS) has measured American adults’ verbal knowledge. This is the ability to correctly define the meaning of words.

The latest God survey to capture public attention was released last week by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Titled "Belief About God Across Time and Countries," the study draws upon data from thirty countries, and some of the findings are interesting, if predictable. Predominately Catholic countries, especially developing ones, have the highest percentage of believers, while Northern Europe and the former Soviet bloc have the lowest.

“That could be seen as good news and bad news for the Catholic Church,” Schwadel said. “Younger Catholics are not being driven away from going to church, but they do still feel less strongly committed to their religion than they did a few decades ago.” Schwadel culled the data for his report from nearly 40,000 responses to the General Social Survey from 1974-2010.

To do so, he crunched data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, examining data on working mothers. Miller’s results were intriguing, but not straightforward. He found that children were more likely to be overweight at ages 9 to 11 and 12 to 14 when their mothers worked.

Americans have become a lot more tolerant of many different types of people and activities. How do we know? Sociologists have been tracking these trends for decades. One of the main treasure troves of data is the General Social Survey (GSS), which has surveyed Americans since the 1970s. Today and all week, we report findings about American trends, relying on Social Trends in American Life: Findings from the General Social Survey since 1972. It’s a new, authoritative compendium of trends based on the GSS data.

The group’s circumstances are getting worse: A smaller portion of households headed by such preretirees had $100,000 or more in financial assets in 2010 (38%) than in 2007 (45%), according to the group’s analysis of the Federal Reserve Board’s 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances.

There is a political party in the United States whose presidential candidate got over 60 million votes, and whose members - according to the General Social Survey - overwhelmingly think we're spending too little on Social Security, rather than spending too much, by a lopsided margin of 52-12. The party, of course, is the Republican Party.

Schwadel based his findings on a major questionnaire called the General Social Survey, which has been administered to a cross-section of Americans yearly or every other year since 1974. Among the questions on this survey are several about religion, including one that asks how strongly affiliated people feel about their denomination.

The private sector has an inadequate retirement system.  It is too small and too risky.  With the decline of defined benefit pensions, most private sector workers will end up with Social Security and the balances in their 401(k) plans.  In 2010, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median 401(k)/IRA holdings for households that had a plan and were approaching retirement (age 55-64) was $120,000.  (IRA balances are included because the bulk of the assets in these accounts have been rolled over from 401(k) plans.)  Moreover, at any moment in time, only 42% of private sector workers have any form of employer-sponsored retirement plan, be it defined benefit or 401(k).  Some of these individuals will pick up some coverage along the way, but a full one-third of households will have nothing but Social Security.

The General Social Survey has a variable, EVOLVED, which records the response to the question “Human beings developed from animals,” with a true vs. false outcome. It was asked between 2006 and 2010. You can see the results for numerous demographics below.

If you believe the studies, there is a LOT of action going on between the sheets among those over 60 -- and even among those over 70 and 80. A large body of research shows that arousal continues well into old age. Specifically, data from the University of Chicago's National Social Life, Health and Aging Project presented in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that many men and women remain sexually active even when in their 70s and 80s.

This USA Today article discusses research conducted by Bruce Taylor, who was the Principal Investigator of this National Institute of Justice funded study

A misperception is that it’s all those piggish, powerful men doing the cheating, some researchers say. Yet new research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, in its General Social Survey, found 19 percent of men admitted they had been unfaithful, compared to 14 percent of women — an increase of 3 percent from 1991. “In my personal practice, it’s very evenly split,” Drew said.

To fill the void until then, consider the data on party identification from 2008 and 2010. (Party identification is less volatile than votes so it will give insight on the political foundation under the vote.) The figure below shows the percentage of General Social Survey respondents – whites only — who said they were Republicans, Democrats, or Independents.

From 2007 to 2010, the median U.S. household net worth fell by 38.8 percent to $77,300, the lowest level since 1992, the Fed said in June in its Survey of Consumer Finances.

The results suggest partisanship is often a substitute for knowledge and personal experience, researchers from the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago said in a release.

Many Americans have blind spots when it comes to how well they know recent controversial policies, and Democrats are in the dark more than Republicans, according to a new comprehensive survey of voters by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Among the most reliable studies on this issue is the General Social Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which has been asking Americans the same questions since 1972. In the 2010 survey, 19 percent of men said that they had been unfaithful at some point during their marriages, down from 21 percent in 1991. Women who reported having an affair increased from 11 percent in 1991 to 14 percent in 2010.

A pre-election survey by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago found that party affiliation alters how people react to political as well as non-political issues, including how individuals assess their own financial well-being.

Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, polling by the AP and the National Opinion Research Center found that those surveyed supported, by 65 to 21 percent, a government policy to read, without warrants, any emails to people inside the U.S. from countries known for terrorism. By 48 to 37 percent, respondents favored warrantless monitoring of U.S. citizens’ Internet searches “to watch for suspicious activities,” not further defined. In other words, I’m willing to give up your rights for my security.

Researchers had 918 men and women fill out an online questionnaire on whether or not they’ve cheated on their partners and why they did it. The results: 19 percent of women admitted to straying outside their relationship—that’s up 5 percentage points from the National Science Foundation’s General Social Survey in 2010. Men aren’t much better: 23 percent of them reported cheating, up 4 percent since 2010.

Third, Christianity is not collapsing, but it is being clarified. If you cut through the recent hype, and look to studies such as the General Social Survey, you'll find the United States is filled with vibrant Believers. The survey shows the evangelical movement has remained generally steady from 1972 to 2010 (and, contrary to what you might have heard, the data include young adults), that church attendance has declined among mainline Protestants, and that the nones have increased. But Christianity has not collapsed.

Study co-authors Leana Bouffard, director of the Crime Victims' Institute at Sam Houston State University, and doctoral student Maria Koeppel used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a long-term study that tracks a sample of U.S. residents born from 1980 to 1984.

Even though I agree with the belief that “pregnancy is a gift of God,” I respectfully disagree with the idea that a raped woman should not be permitted an abortion. The American public also disagrees. The General Social Survey, conducted in 2011 by NORC at the University of Chicago, one of the longest running sources of polling on the topic, reveals the extent of that disagreement. Strong majorities agree that it should possible for a woman to obtain a legal abortion in circumstances when the mother’s physical health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy (86 percent) if she became pregnant as a result of rape (79 percent); if the woman’s mental health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy (74 percent); and if there is strong chance of serious defect in the baby (66 percent).

Penn State's Martin analyzed General Social Survey data from 1991 to 2008. He found the belief in miracles is growing in recent years. Nearly 73 percent of American adults in 1991 believed that miracles definitely or probably existed, compared to 78 percent in 2008. The percentage who "definitely" believed in miracles rose from 45 percent in 1991 to 55 percent in 2008.

Full disclosure: I was AP's Washington bureau chief in 2008 and worked with the news organization's top-shelf pollster, Trevor Tompson, on a similar study that found deep-seated racial misgivings affecting the race between Obama and Sen. John McCain. I visited my hometown of Detroit with colleague Errin Haines to try to put human faces on the results. Our story found "people of both races living just blocks part who nonetheless spoke of each other like strangers. There was suspicion, contempt and yet, for many, a desperate hope that Obama's candidacy might be the final step in America's long path to racial equality."

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52% of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57% in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison. The AP surveys were conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago.

"With the speed, simplicity and cost advantages offered by HP Vertica, we are able focus more on conducting high-quality research and analysis rather than worrying about infrastructure and hardware," said Tim Mulcahy, director, Data Enclave, NORC at the University of Chicago. "HP
Vertica gives NORC a decided competitive advantage, and we already have plans to expand the platform's usage for other projects with big data needs."

The study was conducted by MIT researchers Michele Margolis and Michael Sances and was based on data from NORC at the University of Chicago. It follows a study by three scholars released in May that suggested fundraisers should phrase pitches differently when appealing to Republicans versus Democrats.

A recent consumer survey found that 41% of respondents had less than $500 in savings available on short notice. And the more comprehensive Survey of Consumer Finances released by the Federal Reserve in June calculated that only 52% of American families are earning more than they spend – that’s the lowest figure in 20 years.

According to a 2010 survey by the Daily Beast, Oklahoma ranks as the 12th “most armed” state in the nation. The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey found that 35 percent of Americans have lived with a gun in their house in the past decade. Telephone polls from Gallup and other sources have suggested this number may be closer to 42 percent.

The Pew study is based on interviews with 2,508 adults by cell phone or landline from July 16 to 26, as well as an analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances, which is sponsored by the Federal Reserve. The Pew poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points, larger for subgroups. The AP-LifeGoesStrong.com poll was conducted Oct. 5-12, 2011, by Knowledge Networks of Palo Alto, Calif.

Among the most reliable studies on this issue is the General Social Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which has been asking Americans the same questions since 1972. In the 2010 survey, 19% of men said that they had been unfaithful at some point during their marriages, down from 21% in 1991. Women who reported having an affair increased from 11% in 1991 to 14% in 2010.

Older generations have always been the bread and butter of individual arts giving, but demographic shifts suggest that middle-aged benefactors could become just as important. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, wealth in America is shifting, with more millionaires in their 50s than in their 60s.

These results are based on responses to the question, "Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?" included in 121,290 Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted between June 1 and Sept. 30, 2012. This is the largest single study of the distribution of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population in the U.S. on record. By comparison, the General Social Survey, a project of NORC at the University of Chicago, asked a sexual orientation question in its 2008 and 2010 survey of about 2,000 adults in each year. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' National Survey of Family Growth asked a sexual orientation question of about 12,000 young adults aged 18 to 44 in 2002 and of more than 20,000 adults in its 2006-2010 survey. The 3.4% figure is similar to a 3.8% estimate made by one of the authors of this study (Gates), averaging a group of smaller U.S. surveys conducted from 2004 to 2008.

If you cut through the recent hype, and look to studies such as the General Social Survey, you'll find that the United States is filled with vibrant believers. The survey shows that the evangelical movement has remained generally steady from 1972 to 2010 (and, contrary to what you might have heard, the data include young adults), that church attendance has declined among mainline Protestants, and that the "nones" have increased.

In a study published in the Review of European Studies (Vol. 4, No. 4), professor of development sociology Thomas Hirschl and professor of biological statistics and computational biology James Booth analyzed two large surveys of voter choice. The General Social Survey is a nationally representative, repeat cross-section of American voters across eight presidential elections from 1980 to 2008, and the Cornell National Social Survey (CNSS) recovered identified presidential choice in 1,000 households for the 2008 election. In addition to basic demographic information collected in both surveys, the CNSS included a "biblical authority scale" to assess the degree to which a respondent agreed with such statements as "The Bible is without contradiction" and "The Bible is to be read literally."

The U.S. Census gathers a wealth of demographic data, providing a basic sketch of the American population. But since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has been filling in the outlines of that sketch in living color.

Thus, bringing the American people together implied one kind of bipartisanship - arguably even post-partisanship: one that protects and defends the welfare state, which is absolutely integral to the creation of the modern mass middle class. (Four decades of polling via the General Social Survey and many others shows broad, cross-ideological support for the American welfare state, even among self-identified extreme conservatives.)

These are the kinds of sexual touch this new study, conducted by Dr. Adena Galinsky at the University of Chicago, focused on. She analyzed data from the 2005-2006 National Social Life Health and Aging Project, which surveyed about 3,000 women and men in the United States ages 57 to 85. Galinsky focused on a specific subsample of about 1,300 women and men who reported having had sex at least once in the past year in her quest to understand the relationship between sexual touching — and the difficulties men and women experience with sexual arousal and orgasm.

Among the new sources of data are a 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life of more than 35,000 people. Additional questioning about religion on subsequent Pew Research Center polls, including political-campaign polls, has added tens of thousands of interviews on religion. The latest instance of the American Religious Identification Survey, in 2008, surveyed more than 54,000 people. The General Social Survey, conducted by the NORC research center at the University of Chicago, has polled tens of thousands of Americans since 1972 about their religious identity, beliefs and practices.

Overall, members of Congress are much wealthier than the average person. The median congressman or senator has a net worth of $877,017; that’s 11 times the median American’s net worth in 2010 ($77,300, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances).

The Pew analysis, conducted with PBS' "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly," is based on several surveys, including a poll of nearly 3,000 adults conducted June 28-July 9, 2012. The finding on the Protestant majority is based on responses from a larger group of more than 17,000 people and has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.9 percentage points, Pew researchers said. Pew said it had also previously calculated a drop slightly below 50 percent among U.S. Protestants, but those findings had fallen within the margin of error; the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago reported for 2010 that the percentage of U.S. Protestants was around 46.7 percent.

The private health plans that administer the Medicare drug benefit use various tools to encourage the use of generic drugs in order to lower total drug spending. Higher generic drug use also appears to encourage consumers to continue taking their medications. This study examines how different drug plan benefit and formulary designs influence the selection of generic drugs to treat high cholesterol among Medicare beneficiaries. We found that a low copayment for generic statins is the strongest factor influencing the use of these drugs, and eliminating the copay altogether has an especially large effect.

Avoid restrictions. Some part D plans require prior authorization before you can fill certain prescriptions and have quantity limits regarding how much medication you can get at one time. You could also be required to try one or more similar, lower-cost drugs before the plan will cover a more expensive prescribed drug. "It's also important to check whether the plan you're considering has any restrictions on your drugs, like prior authorization or step therapy. Those can be a real hassle," says Elizabeth Hargrave, a senior research scientist at NORC. "If there's a specific drug that you really need, it's worth looking into how much of a hassle it would be to actually get it."

One is the loneliest number: Religious service attendance may protect against loneliness in later life by integrating older adults into larger and more supportive social networks. Researchers Sunshine Rote and Terrence Hill of Florida State University and Christopher Ellison of the University of Texas at San Antonio analyzed data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. They found involvement in religious institutions can be an important social resource for older adults.

For generations, home equity has been the holy grail of wealth accumulation for families. In 2007, the median family held nearly $100,000 in home equity, according to the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Home equity was responsible for nearly three quarters of family wealth. However, that’s all in the past.

Struggling to balance work and family responsibilities took a toll on my mom. Not only was she worried about me, she also spent her days stressing about paying bills on less income and even losing her job. According to the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, one in six workers reports that they or a family member had been fired, suspended, punished or threatened with being fired for taking time off due to personal illness or to care for a sick child or relative.

If you had the sense that Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin are very much figures of the 1970s nexus of environmentalism and population control, it seems you are right. According to Google Ngrams mention of these topics has been declining since peaking during the oil crisis, in the afterglow of the influence of the late 1960s counter-culture. The general social survey has a variable,

PRC reports that it has done so, rising from 25 percent in 2008 to 32 percent this past July. Other pollsters asked this self-identification question in 1976, 1984, 1987, and 2004, and like PRC in 2008 they all found the lower-than-middle share to be between 24 percent and 27 percent. The question has been asked six times since 2010 (five times by PRC), and the share ranged from 29 percent to 40 percent in those surveys. The venerable General Social Survey has asked people to self-identify as lower, working, middle, or upper class since 1972, and it also found that the share of Americans self-identifying as lower than middle class was relatively high in 2008 and 2010, although the 2008 percentage (53) was lower than the one in 1972, and the 2010 percentage (55) was lower than the one in 1982. The share fell between 1996 and 2004, with the 2004 percentage (48) matching the General Social Survey’s 1989 low.

...used to detect and model heterogeneous treatment effects, we reanalyze a well-known survey experiment on welfare attitudes from the General Social Survey. ...

Tom Smith, a researcher for NORC at the University of Chicago, said the number of people living downtown would likely keep rising in the near future. With a declining crime rate and plenty of housing options, downtown remains a popular option for affluent Chicagoans.

A new book released last week, "Social Trends in American Life", sees a group of prominent American social scientists presenting and explaining the results of the General Social Survey—an ongoing study that has regularly recorded and tracked changes in social attitudes and make-up since the early 1970s. Every other year, researchers collect detailed information from a large random sample of American adults in order to understand how American society is evolving.

"There's always a trade off in polls between cost and perfect coverage of the population," said Trevor Tompson, the Principal Research Scientist and Director, Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. "You never have an unlimited budget."

Metrics do exist, by the way, for both trustworthiness and for the propensity to trust. At a corporate level, Trust Across America provides a sound definition of trustworthiness, and data for all publicly traded U.S. companies. At a personal level, the Trust Quotient from Trusted Advisor Associates does the same. One of the oldest and most established trust metrics comes from the General Social Survey, which has tracked for 40 years the answers to a few questions about the propensity to trust strangers.

Happiness should be serendipitous, a by-product of a life well lived, and pursuing it in a vacuum doesn’t really work. This is borne out by a series of slightly depressing statistics. The most likely customer of a self-help book is a person who has bought another self-help book in the last 18 months. The General Social Survey, a prominent data-based barometer of American society, shows little change in happiness levels since 1972, when such records began. Every year, with remarkable consistency, around 33 percent of Americans report that they are “very happy.” It’s a fair chunk, but a figure that remains surprisingly constant, untouched by the uptick in Eastern meditation or evangelical Christianity, by Tony Robbins or Gretchen Rubin or attachment parenting. For all the effort Americans are putting into happiness, they are not getting any happier. It is not surprising, then, that the search itself has become a source of anxiety.

And—as Dr. Phil would ask—how’s all that freedom working … for us? Not very well, says Mary Eberstadt, author of Adam and Eve After the Pill. The sexual revolution’s legacy, she maintains, is “the paradox of declining female happiness.” She cites a 2009 study in which two Wharton School professors, using 35 years of General Social Survey data, found that despite educational and employment advances, women were reportedly less happy than they used to be. Ouch!

And using the gold standard of social surveys — the General Social Survey, in which researchers have questioned thousands of Americans of all income levels going back to the 1970s — researchers even quantified how much happier the families were. The improvement was equal to the level of life satisfaction of someone whose annual income was $13,000 more a year, said Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the study.

— A new one-year fellowship to foster reporting on the economics of aging and work was announced by Oreskes. Journalists working in text, radio, television or online formats for the AP or APME news organizations will be eligible to compete for the program and work with The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research to cover the economics of working longer. Funding comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And it is becoming even less affordable for lower-middle-class families, according to a paper presented at the American Sociological Association's meeting in August. "Disparities in Debt: Parents' Socioeconomic Resources and Young Adult Student Loan Debt" presents findings that, among students surveyed in the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (which surveyed students in 1997 when they were ages 12-16 and then again in 2009 at ages 24-28), students from families with incomes from $40,000 to $59,000 borrowed $12,000 more than those whose families earned $100,000 to $149,000, and more than $17,000 more than those whose families earned more than $150,000. They also borrowed more than $6,000 more than low-income students whose families earned less than $40,000.

Such norms continue to exercise a powerful influence. In 2010, the General Social Survey asked a representative sample of Americans whether they agreed that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” About 35 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed.

Claessens and Ryan used data from the Maternal and Child Supplement of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It has regularly surveyed a sample of 3,492 youth, whose ages were 14 to 21 in 1979; in 1986, it also began surveying the children of female NLSY respondents.

And how is this likely to play out in the future? Every election will have its own dynamic, but religious attendance has been falling steadily. According to General Social Survey data, in 1972, 41 percent of Americans said they attended services nearly every week or more often, while only 16 percent said they attended less than once a year or never. By 2010, the frequent attendees had declined to 30 percent of the population, while those barely ever or never attending had increased to 29 percent. In other words, 40 years ago there were almost three times as many highly religious people as non-religious people (measured by their participation), while today the two groups are equal in size.

A new poll shows that Americans would rather get a break on their energy bills than take a break for vacation. Asked about their priorities, a majority in an AP-NORC Center poll valued saving money on energy, reducing the amount of electricity they use, and making sure their home is energy efficient ahead of having the latest tablet or smartphone, or going on vacation. Less than one in five thought a summer trip or the latest electronic gadget was more important than taking steps to reduce their energy use. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

So many people search for a meaningful path in life, a job where they feel as though their contributions matter. They want to make a difference, and they want the chance to be creative in how they make that difference. This is exactly what being a therapist offers. It's no wonder, then, that "therapist" made the list of top ten most satisfying careers in the General Social Survey.

"We took people who didn't live with their grandchildren and looked at how many hours of care they provide," says sociologist Linda Waite, a co-author of the study. For some people that might mean "babysitting for going out. For sure, it's day care for some people."

Over the last 20 years, the proportion of Americans who say they have ever cheated on their spouse has hovered at 20 to 25 percent of men and 10 to 15 percent of women, according to findings published in 2010 by Deborah Carr, a sociologist who is also at Rutgers. However, more recent data from the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, has indicated patterns by demographics, she says. One of which is that the gender gap is narrowing among younger people. One quarter of men ages 65 and older say they have cheated, compared with less than 10 percent of their female peers. But among Americans ages 18 to 24, 12.9 percent of women have cheated, versus 15.9 percent of their male counterparts.

"We took people who didn't live with their grandchildren and looked at how many hours of care they provide," says sociologist Linda Waite, a co-author of the study. For some people that might mean "babysitting for going out. For sure, it's day care for some people."

And millions more live their lives without any interest in religion whatsoever. The statistics are surprisingly clear on this front. Back in the 1990s, about 8 percent of Americans claimed "none" as their religion. Then, in 2007, the Pew Forum found that the percentage of non-religious Americans had doubled, up to 16 percent. In 2010, Putnam and Campbell's national survey put the percentage at 17 percent. In 2011, the General Social Survey reported it at 18 percent.

Jay Zagorsky, an assistant BU finance professor and researcher at The Ohio State University, used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that has collected data on a random sample of 9,000 people since they were teens.

Nevertheless, the racial gap is still quite large among those with some post-secondary education but who have not completed college. For example, the black white gap among those with 14 years of schooling is still sizable at 16 percent. Given that only 17 percent of blacks in the NLSY attained more than 14 years of schooling, this suggests that marginal improvements in educational attainment may not do a great deal to improve the overall upward mobility prospects of blacks.

Percentage of high school students who are hopeful about the nation’s future—up from 53% in 2008, according to the 2012 State of Our Nation’s Youth report from the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Read the full report here.

The study involved 4,414 participants in the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which contains data on a nationally representative sample of young men and women from 1997.

Though the share of Americans who are married has declined in the last half century, many have found wedded happiness and see love as the central feature of a marriage. A 2010 Pew Research Center/Time poll found that 93 percent of married adults said love was a vital reason they got married. And most single Americans said love was the most important reason to get married. In that same year's General Social Survey, 63 percent of married people described their marriages as "very happy."

Previous studies have found that the children of working mothers tend to have a higher body mass index, or BMI, and higher obesity rates than children of nonworking mothers. For example, in 2003, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics examined families with children 3 to 11 years old and found that 10 additional weekly hours of maternal employment over the course of the child's life increased their chances of becoming obese by 1.0 to 1.5 percentage points.

Republican Party trends - A demographic look at how the Republican Party has changed over time.

Lead researcher Kelly LeRoux, assistant professor of public administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago, got her data from the 2002 General Social Survey, in which a national sample of 2,765 randomly selected adults participated.

But among those who oppose unrestricted abortion rights, just over six in 10 are open to the idea that rape victims should have access to the procedure, according to General Social Surveys conducted over the past decade by NORC at the University of Chicago. That has fallen since the 1970s, when the figure was more than seven in 10.

In 1996, for example, the General Social Survey asked a large sample of Americans whether “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” — a key ideological litmus test. Thirty-three percent of respondents agreed; 43 percent disagreed. The two groups differed sharply in more than their politics. The conservatives — those who opposed government programs to reduce inequality — were significantly more likely to donate money to charity than the liberals. And among those who did donate, conservatives gave away, on average, four times as much money per year.

Finally, the General Social Survey has been asking the exact same six questions about abortion attitudes since the early 1970s. These questions include hard cases, such as whether abortion should be a legal option when the pregnancy results from a rape. They also include cases where more people would feel comfortable restricting abortion, such as where the woman is married and does not want additional children. These surveys show that on average men and women have fairly similar attitudes toward abortion. Some analyses of this data show that when certain demographic factors are held constant, women are actually slightly more pro-life than men.

Mr Tabarrok dips into the General Social Survey and fishes out some data difficult to square with the idea that most racists, much less almost all, are Republicans, or Republican-ish. Mr Tabarrok concludes, "It is undeniable that some Americans are racist but racists split about evenly across the parties." Mr Sides takes a look at the 2008 American National Election Study and finds that assessments of the intelligence and industry of blacks...

In the health insurance exchanges that will come online in 2014, consumers will be able to compare health plans with respect to actuarial value, or the percentage of health care costs that a plan would pay for a standard population. This analysis illustrates the out-of-pocket costs that might result from plans with various plan designs and actuarial values. We find that average out-of-pocket expense declines as actuarial values rise, but two plans with similar actuarial values can produce very different outcomes for a given person. The overall affordability of a plan also will be influenced by age rating, income-related premium subsidies, and out-of-pocket subsidies. Actuarial value is a useful starting point for selecting a plan, but it does not pinpoint which plan will produce the best overall value for a particular person.

The number of Americans who identify with a Protestant denomination has been steadily slipping from more than 60 percent in the 1970s to 52 percent in 2010, said Duke University sociologist Mark Chaves, who tracks religion statistics in the national General Social Survey, conducted biannually by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Does abortion for rape victims really connect with law-and-order voters? To check the data, I went to the University of California’s Survey Documentation and Analysis site, where you can run customized cross-tabulations using the multidecade General Social Survey. I started with the GSS rape question: “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if she became pregnant as a result of rape.” For comparison, I selected an identically phrased GSS question about a scenario in which “the family has a very low income and cannot afford any more children.”

Given that more than 80% of the public, according to the General Social Survey, thinks courts are “not harsh enough” on criminals—and convicted felons lose the vote—imposing harsh sentences would appear to be a quite logical, cost-free way to improve popularity. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is among those who have argued for doing away with judicial elections, to shield them from political pressure.

The July 24 poll found that 92% of registered voters already know their presidential selection. And an earlier, AP Associate Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (apnorc.org) survey – "Energy Issues: How the Public Understands and Acts" – found that party affiliation predicts consumer energy views more reliably than any other factor.

The loss of wealth for most families raising children is increasingly creating a larger and larger wealth divide. Before the "Great Recession," the 2007 survey of Consumer finance shows a doubling of wealth inequality between couples with children and couples without children. In 1998 the median wealth of couples without children was about $24,000 higher than couples with children. By 2007 this wealth disparity had increased to $50,000, so that couples with children had a third less wealth than their childless counterparts. For women and most minorities the low wealth tied to child rearing is even more extreme.

This one might hit home the hardest: The median American family’s net worth fell to $77,300 in 2010 from $126,400 in 2007, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance. That erased nearly two decades of accumulated wealth.

We recently published a list of the 10 unhappiest jobs in America based on a report compiled by CareerBliss, but then we found a similar list conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago’s survey, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 and part of the National Social Life Health and Aging Project, found that sexual activity declined with age. It was 73 percent among 57-to- 64-year-olds, 53 percent among 65-to-74-year-olds, and 26 percent among 75-to-85-year-olds. The most common problems among women were low desire (43 percent), followed by difficulty with vaginal lubrication (39 percent). For men, the biggest problem was erectile difficulties (37 percent).

This can be seen in several ways. The General Social Survey (GSS) has been collecting opinion data on abortion using the exact same battery of questions since the 1970s. In most years, respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 tend to be the least sympathetic toward the pro-life position. However, starting around the year 2000, those between the ages 18 and 29 were on average significantly more pro-life than those from other age cohorts.

I enthusiastically encourage anyone who has ever been involved with an arts organization that renovated, expanded or built new;  a board that said, “if we only had more seats, we could sell more tickets;” a feasibility study that overstated the need for the building and understated the community’s ability to raise funds; an elected official who said, “what our small city needs is a world-class __________ facility;” or a funder that has been asked to support a building project to read Set in Stone, a recently released report from the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center and NORC.

The poll, released Wednesday by the Horatio Alger Association, surveyed 1,500 students ages 14 to 23 around the country. It found that three in every four students have "some" or "major" concerns about whether they will be able to pay for college.

The oldest Americans now are the wealthiest. Data from the Federal Reserve Board show that in 2010, households headed by people age 75 and above had the highest median net worth at $216,800 (half were worth more, half less). It was the first time they ranked at the top since the Survey of Consumer Finances began, in its current form, in 1989.

Even more important, there is evidence that it improved the lives of those who moved off welfare. In the Berkeley Electronic Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy (2011), Santa Clara University's John Ifcher showed, using data from the General Social Survey, that single mothers—despite lost leisure time and increased stress from finding child care and performing household duties while working—were significantly happier about their lives in the eight years after reforms led them into the workforce.

Support for legalization has always been higher in the West, with its more libertarian pioneer traditions. And nationally, support for legalization has been growing rapidly (support for medical marijuana runs between 60 and 80 percent, depending on how the question is asked). Last year, support for outright legalization exceeded 50 percent in the Gallup poll for the first time. Other surveys show similar results; shown here are data from the General Social Survey, which has asked this question since the 1970s.

If Americans are asked what class they think they’re in, most will say the middle class. But if asked to choose between the upper, middle, working and lower class, only 45 percent say the middle class, according to the General Social Survey. Roughly the same share choose the working class.Few pick upper or lower.

"It's the richest country, but not the happiest. … There's room for improvement," says co-author John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia. The report says U.S. GDP per capita has tripled since 1960, but Americans' happiness has barely budged in polling by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Center and the General Social Survey.

"Those who own guns, own more guns," said Josh Sugarmann, the executive director and founder of the Violence Policy Center, a Washington-based gun control advocacy group. Last year the organization released an analysis of figures from the General Social Survey, which found that both the number of households owning guns and the number of people owning guns were decreasing.

In all 50 states and the District of Columbia data were collected using the General Social Survey, which measured social capital (defined as interpersonal trust that promotes cooperation between citizens for mutual benefit), along with poverty and relative income inequality, homicide rates, incidence of other crimes (rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft), unemployment, percentage of high school graduates, and average alcohol consumption. By using a statistical method known as principal component analysis, Kawachi was then able to identify which ecologic variables were most associated with particular types of crime.

At the University of Chicago, husband-and-wife researchers Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova looked at records for nearly 1,600 Americans born between 1880 and 1895 who achieved age 100, as well as more than 10,000 shorter-lived siblings and more than 1,000 spouses.

In 1990, the percentage of American adults who professed no religion in surveys stood at 8 percent. But by 2001, that number had almost doubled to 14 percent of the population, or about one in every seven people. Now, the most recent polls are finding even higher numbers: the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found 15 percent, the 2010 General Social Survey found 18 percent, and a Pew Research survey from late 2011 reported 19 percent, an all-time high-water mark. Throughout this same time period, all the country’s largest religions reported membership that was either flat or declining. And since the upcoming generation, the so-called millennials, is both the biggest and the least religious generation in American history, this trend is poised to accelerate in the decades ahead.

The article goes on to detail how exactly marriage is working for the upper middle class, and it is not working for the lower and lower middle class. But there isn’t much more than anecdote for social attitudes, as opposed to actions (which may have material bases). So I decided to look at the General Social Survey. I looked at the variable DIVLAW over the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s. Then I limited the sample to whites, and divided them between those with college degrees, and those without. To my surprise the “trend story” seems about right in broad strokes:

"People are increasingly looking for simple methods of honoring the departed, not more elaborate ones," said Publisher Ron Hast of Tiburon. "The big funerals in big churches, we just don't see them as much as we used to. And because cremations are so common now, that has led to fewer people needing graves." The General Social Survey reports that 22 percent of Americans never attend religious services, up from 13 percent in 1990.

But as studies on family structure demonstrate, men aren’t just useful to have around in an emergency. Stopping bullets is not the only thing they are good for. When men cease to perform their roles as husbands and fathers (because they’ve been invited not to by the feminist movement) the result is social decline. Children are clearly worse off when they grow up without a dad at home. Every social pathology is more pronounced in the children of single mothers than in those from two-parent homes. But women too have paid a steep price. Women are not as happy as they used to be. Every year since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked a representative sample of Americans about their happiness. And every year the reported happiness of women has declined.

In all 50 states and the District of Columbia data were collected using the General Social Survey that measured social capital (defined as interpersonal trust that promotes cooperation between citizens for mutual benefit), along with measures of poverty and relative income inequality, homicide rates, incidence of other crimes–rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft–unemployment, percentage of high school graduates, and average alcohol consumption. By using a statistical method known as principal component analysis Kawachi was then able to identify which ecologic variables were most associated with particular types of crime.

The slow recovery hits people of all ages, of course. But it’s likely to be especially hard on the young, as a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes clear. The report looks at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which in 1979 began tracking nearly 10,000 Americans born between 1957 and 1964.

We have to rely on polling data because there is no national database of who owns a gun. One poll is the the now biennial General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. These surveys are conducted face-to-face. We also traditional telephone polls conducted by ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and Gallup.

"Yeah, I would contest that. Actually, if you look at general social survey data over the past three decades, you know, back in the mid-'70s, it was a point where more than half of American households owned a gun. By 2010, that had declined to one out of every three American households owned a gun. So the long-term curve is actually showing gun ownership declining. The phenomenon we're seeing is stockpiling of firearms, that those who do own guns are stockpiling firearms."

First, we are a less violent nation now than we've been in over forty years. In 2010, violent crime rates hit a low not seen since 1972; murder rates sunk to levels last experienced during the Kennedy Administration. Our perceptions of our own safety have shifted, as well. In the early 1980s, almost half of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) they were "afraid to walk alone at night" in their own neighborhoods; now only one-third feel this way....

The decline in gun ownership began some years earlier, according to data from Gallup and the General Social Survey, conducted by the NORC at the University of Chicago. New York University political scientist Patrick Egan charted the decline in a recent blog post.

Other studies have also found significant declines in retiree net worth. The Federal Reserve's most recent Survey of Consumer Finance, released last month, found that the median net worth of households headed by someone between age 65 and 74 declined from $250,800 in 2007 to $206,700 in 2010, which is below the $217,800 net worth this age group had in 2001. "Both declines in the value of financial assets, including retirement accounts and declines in the value of housing, contributed to the decline in net worth between 2007 and 2010 for families headed by a person 65 years or older," says Jesse Bricker, an economist for the Federal Reserve Board and co-author of the report.

This is the first study which found month-of-birth effects on longevity by using a within-family analysis, which proves that month-of-birth effects are real, and are not related to differences between families,” said Leonid Gavrilov, an expert on aging, mortality, and longevity at the University of Chicago. “The findings of this study support the idea of early-life programming of human aging and longevity.”

First, we are a less violent nation now than we’ve been in over forty years. In 2010, violent crime rates hit a low not seen since 1972; murder rates sunk to levels last experienced during the Kennedy Administration. Our perceptions of our own safety have shifted, as well. In the early 1980s, almost half of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) they were “afraid to walk alone at night” in their own neighborhoods; now only one-third feel this way.

Even worse, nearly one in four workers reports that they have lost a job or were told they would lose their job if they took time off due to personal or family illness, according to the NORC at the University of Chicago.

While financial planners often advise people to pay off their mortgage before they retire, fully 24% of households headed by a 75-year-old or older person had mortgage debt in 2010, up from 6% in 1989, according to the AARP report, which cited the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

Without the economic census, important survey coverage of the economy that informs such measurements as gross domestic product would be threatened. We can’t misread changes in the economy at a time when it is paramount that all of us have solid facts.

Kosmin's surveys were the first to brand the Nones in 1990 when they were 6% of U.S. adults. By 2008 survey, Nones were up to 15%. By 2010, another survey, the bi-annual General Social Survey, bumped the number to 18%.

Michael J. O'Grady, PhD, former HHS Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, has joined the West Health Policy Center as its inaugural president.  Launched by pioneering philanthropists Gary and Mary West earlier this year, the Center's mission is to develop common sense reimbursement and regulatory proposals that will save the United States more than $100 billion in cumulative health care costs within 10 years.

These troubled people can devastate their lives and those of their families through the intensity of their gambling. A National Opinion Research Center survey noted that nearly 20 percent of self-reported pathological gamblers and 11 percent of problem gamblers had filed for bankruptcy at some point in their lives, vs. less than 5 percent of non-gamblers.

The readers of this weblog are relatively non-fecund, at least going by reader surveys. But I was curious nonetheless about the attitudes toward number of children, and realized goals of number of children, in the General Social Survey.

The draft measure does offer some solace to those concerned about proposed changes to the National Children's Study, which will follow the health of 100,000 children from birth to age 21. It would give the study $175 million, an $18 million cut from this year but more than the $165 million requested by the president. The bill also puts a roadblock in NIH's controversial plan to revamp how pregnant women will be recruited for the study: NIH can make "no changes to the current design or Vanguard pilot structure until at least 90 days after the IOM [Institute of Medicine] conducts a review of the proposed changes and impact on the results."

A study that tracked children who were 12 to 14 years old at the start of 1996 shows that those who didn’t live with both parents were less likely to have moved up to a higher income group 12 years later as adults.

The General Social Survey from the University of Chicago reveals that people who say they feel “very successful” or “completely successful” in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy about their overall lives than people who feel “somewhat successful.”

Periodically in the last 100 years there have been a series of building booms and many of our historic cultural institutions that people are familiar with in major cities are the result of those prior ones. This particular one we learned about through talking with arts consultants who were helping organizations across the country think about facilities, both new ones and major renovations of existing facilities. And what they noticed was a leaning towards building very large facilities and ones that seemed to them, in many cases, in excess of their needs or at least putting them at some risk because they were larger than appeared to be sustainable. We picked the period 1994 to 2008 for two reasons.

So Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, both at the University of Chicago, gathered data from more than 1500 centenarians born in the US between 1880 and 1895. They compared birth and death information with that of the centenarians' siblings and spouses – the siblings would have experienced a similar early environment and genetic background and the spouses would have a experienced a similar environment in their adult life.

That might sound inflammatory to some arts groups, but it’s also good news in the long run. In February 2011, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago published an NEA report showing, among other things, that taking classes in the arts produces arts consumers.

Four decades of GSS data shows fluctuating levels of support for social spending, but remarkable stability for this same basic fact: a solid majority of self-identified conservatives have always said that spending on national social programmes and problems is either "too little" or "about right".

Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.

This intense love of country defines Americans and, compared to many, sets us apart. A 2004 study of 33 countries by NORC at the University of Chicago ranked the United States first in national pride.

When asked about the little things they could do to save energy, only 11 percent say they turn off the lights when leaving the room, 5 percent keep their air conditioning at 78 degrees in the summer, and 10 percent turn the heat down to 68 degrees during the day and 65 at night in the winter, according to a 2012 survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. the

However, $350,000 is by far more than what most Americans save. According to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, the average household approaching retirement has only $100,000 in total retirement savings among all of their accounts.

Architects can also run away with a project, the study reports. “They say the building is for you, but the building is for them,” Mr. Joynes said. “It’s for the pictures and for their careers. From their point of view it’s a real success if it gets built.”

The authors studied National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 97 from 2002-09. The study's authors say their findings could be important for how to relate alcohol consumption.

Prompted by a comment below I was curious as to the correlation between intelligence and income. To indicate intelligence I used the GSS’s WORDSUM variable, which has a ~0.70 correlation with IQ. For income, I used REALINC, which is indexed to 1986 values (so it is inflation adjusted) and aggregates the household income. Finally, I limited my sample to non-Hispanic whites over the age of 30 (for what it’s worth, this choice also limited the data set to respondents from the year 2000 and later).

We used data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This survey has been following to this day a group of American youth who were then 14 to 21 years old, and who are now well into their fifties. So these are wonderful data for studying how people's lives unfold.

Forty percent, if we're putting it into context, does appear to be somewhat higher than the national average. In 2006, Duke University researchers looked at data from the General Social Survey, a regular sampling of Americans' attitudes. A quarter of Americans reported feeling as though they had no one they could confide in, which makes the figure for the elderly about as disappointing as Carroll says.

Last week, the Federal Reserve released its Survey of Consumer Finance which showed the median family had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, levels last seen in 1992, down from $126,400 in 2007.

Looking at just income, the Fed’s survey of consumer finances found that over the same period, the median value of real (inflation-adjusted) family income before taxes fell 7.7 percent. Others have experienced a much greater loss in income. My friend went from earning $52,000 as a senior executive assistant for a trade association to her current salary of $38,000 working for a nonprofit.

The Associated Press-NORC Center Poll on the politics of energy was conducted from March 29 to April 15 by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It is based on landline and cellular telephone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,008 adults. Interviews were conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago and included 752 respondents on landline telephones and 256 on cellphones.

A survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that the polarized positions on energy that have divided Congress and emerged in the presidential campaign also run deep among the public.

Stephen W. Raudenbush, the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, delivered the 511th Convocation address. Raudenbush, who chairs the Committee on Education at UChicago, studies child development within social settings like schools and neighborhoods. This spring, he joined the National Academy of Sciences as an elected fellow.

Forty-two percent of homosexuals and bisexuals reported employment discrimination because of their sexual orientation, according to the 2008 General Social Survey, a sociological survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

The articles on the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finance release from yesterday give you an excellent flavor of the magnitude of what's been lost in the Great Recession. But I haven't seen this figure posted yet (though I may have missed it somewhere, of course). It's simply the trend in real median net worth from the SCFs going back to 1989 (this survey is taken every three years; see data caveats below). There's a little dip in the 1990s downturn, a flattening in the 2001 recession, and then...a massive cliff dive in the Great Recession.

The new data comes from the Fed’s much-anticipated release on Monday of its Survey of Consumer Finances, a report issued every three years that is one of the broadest and deepest sources of information about the financial health of American families.

Six in 10 surveyed say driving a more fuel-efficient car would save a large amount of energy, but only 1 in 4 says that's easy to do, according to the poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. People also are skeptical of carpooling or installing better home insulation, rating them as effective but impractical.

The poll, paid for by a grant to the The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Joyce Foundation, shows that energy, especially in a weak economy, is prominently on people's minds — and may explain why it's being talked about in the presidential campaign. Nearly 8 in 10 called energy deeply important to them, trumping concerns about the federal deficit and the environment. The only issues that polled as higher concerns were the economy, education and health care. Almost three-quarters said gasoline prices were important to them personally, although those prices have abated since the poll was taken.

“Some of the more expensive things, like (buying a) fuel-efficient car or changing out the insulation in your home, those were some of the hardest thing that people thought to do,” said Jennifer Benz, a research scientist with NORC.

Certificates may particularly benefit those who struggle with academics. The report, which analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, administered by the United States Department of Education, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation, administered by the Census Bureau, found that those who gained certificates earned about the same median income as those who attended some college. Yet the median score of certificate holders on the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, a standardized test, is several points lower than those who complete some college.

Oesterle’s characterization of Obama’s political calculus reflects a recent trend: despite widespread public support for space exploration, recent polls suggest that the issue is getting increasingly polarized. The overall percentage of the American population supporting the enterprise remained roughly constant between 2008 and 2010 according to NORC at the Uuniversity of Chicago, but the groups declaring that the government spent “too little” or “too much” both grew by about 5 percentage points.

Not long ago, the psychologists Timothy Judge and Charlice Hurst conducted a fascinating study. Partnering with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth they examined the progress of more than 12,000 people for more than two decades. They were interested in all sorts of advantages and disadvantages that might impact whether a person winds up digging ditches or founding the next Apple Computer.

“I think that’s not consistent with clinical research,” says Eric Goplerud, who directs the substance abuse, mental health and criminal justice studies department at NORC, a research organization at the University of Chicago.

Pro-choice groups see abortion as an issue of women’s rights, reproductive freedom, and respecting privacy. But look at long-term data from the General Social Survey, a multidecade project of NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey shows that over the past 40 years, public opinion has shifted in the pro-choice direction on all three of those themes. And yet, contrary to the pro-choice inference, it hasn’t shifted on abortion.

But the study also showed that people now covered through an employer were already in plans that met the federal standards. Those plans are likely to continue to be more generous than individual plans available through the state insurance exchanges required by the law, according to Jon R. Gabel, the study’s lead author and a health researcher at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago’s Jon Gabel lead a team of researchers in examining how many health insurance plans in the individual market meet those requirements right now. He found that most didn’t: 51 percent will not be able to sell on the new health insurance exchanges without increasing their benefits. A lot of that had to do with individual market plans not offering maternity coverage, one of the more costly benefits -- and one that plans must pay for under the Affordable Care Act.

About 51 percent of people with individual coverage have average deductibles of $3,881, the study showed, five times the amount for employer group plans. In addition, coverage sold to single people today may exclude pre-existing conditions, and most individual policies don’t include maternity care without costly riders, said Jon Gabel, the researcher who led the study.

Larry Bye, a Senior Fellow with NORC at the University of Chicago, presented that finding earlier this month in a report on focus group sessions delivered to the California Health Benefit Exchange.

Not all political conservatives are Flat Earthers, of course. But there are proportionately more of them than there used to be, according to the Review article.For that piece, Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, analyzed information from the General Social Survey, conducted every year since 1972 by NORC at the University of Chicago.

On this inaugural episode of the all new Contexts Podcast, Jessica Streeter speaks with Henry H. Brownstein and Timothy M. Mulcahy, co-authors of the Winter 2012 Contexts feature, Home Cooking: Marketing Meth.

“If it’s voluntary, then we’ll just get bad data,” said Kenneth Prewitt, a former director of the census who is now at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “That means businesses will make bad decisions, and government will make bad decisions, which means we won’t even know where we actually are wasting our tax dollars.”

That’s the provocative question being asked by researchers in a recent paper, which was flagged by Lauren Stiller Rikleen in a Harvard Business Review blog on Thursday. The researchers — Arthur Brief, Dolly Chugh and Sreedhari D. Desai — used national surveys like the General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center, as well as direct results from studies of married male managers and students with full-time jobs.

At Yale, in 2006 (before Connecticut repealed its UPPL law), a patient was stuck with a $218,000
bill, said Eric Goplerud. Ph.D., Senior Vice President for Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Criminal Justice Studies at NORC at the University of Chicago.

The administration announcement came as the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its first-ever National Former Prisoners Survey, which found that 9.6 percent of former inmates said they were sexually victimized in jails, prisons and halfway houses. A somewhat similar survey of still-imprisoned convicts done by the same agency in 2008-09 found that only 4.4 percent of state and federal inmates said they were sexually victimized.

Stepping off the traditional Ph.D. career path can make one hypersensitive. A recent dialogue in The University of Chicago Magazine about modifying graduate curriculum in Ph.D. departments in history to accommodate a nonacademic trajectory (or Plan B) led me think about how Ph.D.s  are actually trained, and how that training is used to build new knowledge. This dialogue was a reaction to a statement in the fall by the president of American Historical Association about removing the stigma of "Plan B" from a nonacademic career path.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Lovenheim and Reynolds looked at how changes in short-run home prices affected families with college-age students. They found that for every $10,000 in additional assets a family gained in the four years leading up to a child's enrollment in college, the child was 2 percent likelier to attend a flagship public university rather than a regional public institution, and 1.6 percent less likely to enroll in a community college. The lower the family's overall income, the bigger the impact of the increase in housing values; those with annual incomes of under $75,000 were 8.3 percent likelier to attend a flagship university for every $10,000 gain in home value, while the impact was statistically insignificant for those with incomes above $125,000.

When a person is born even seems to make a difference. A study of 1,574 American centenarians and more than 10,000 of their shorter-lived siblings and spouses led by Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova of the University of Chicago found that babies with a fall birthday have a slightly higher chance of becoming centenarians than babies born in spring months.

The study, conducted by Harvard School of Public Health researchers, included data from the General Social Surveys from 1972 to 2006. The researchers found that the likelihood of Republicans reporting poor health was 26 percent lower than Democrats, while the likelihood of Republicans smoking was 15 percent lower than Democrats.

We can see this at work in survey data. I took the 2010 wave of the General Social Survey  and pulled all 395 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents (PARTYID==4/6). For these people I compared their attitudes on marijuana (GRASS) and government redistribution of wealth (EQWLTH, which I cut to a binary with responses 1/4). Among Republicans who oppose wealth distribution, 37% favor legalizing marijuana, as opposed to 38% among those who favor wealth redistribution. This difference of one percentage point is not even remotely statistically significant (chi2 0.08, 1 df).

Technology has exacerbated exasperation, as well: jarringly loud talking on cellphones (and unattended phones' ringtones), cheap earbuds bleeding sound into nearby cubicles, or Facebook "friend" requests from casual co-worker acquaintances. Oversharing, either via social media or office chit-chat, is rampant. And as more companies lump together vacation and sick days, anywhere from 40 to 55 percent of us sometimes come to work with a contagious disease, according to a 2010 study by NORC at the University of Chicago.

The link between earned success and life satisfaction is well established by researchers. The University of Chicago's General Social Survey, for example, reveals that people who say they feel "very successful" or "completely successful" in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy than people who feel "somewhat successful." It doesn't matter if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.

NORC Senior Fellow Stephen W. Raudenbush, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Raudenbush, the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, develops and applies quantitative methods for studying child and youth development within social settings such as classrooms, schools and neighborhoods

Some 20% of men and 14% of women who have ever been married have had extramarital sex, according to federally sponsored research conducted since 1972 by the social-science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. (Reliable statistics about infidelity are scarce, largely because many people won't own up to an affair.) Mr. Rothrock's affair took place by video chat and other electronic means, but it was no less sexual or emotional, he says.

A report recently released discusses the strength of people’s belief in God in 30 countries and how their beliefs changed during their lifetime. The report is called “Beliefs About God Across Time And Countries” and it was operated by NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey asked the questions below of those involved in order to figure out their belief or unbelief in God.

Prof. Mario L. Small has been appointed dean of the Social Sciences Division for a five-year term, President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum announced. Small’s appointment takes effect on July 1. Small has served as associate editor of the American Journal of Sociology and is currently editorial board member of Social Science Quarterly, City and Community, and Sociological Forum, a council member of the American Sociological Association, and a trustee of NORC at the University of Chicago.

"As committee chairmen, Cabinet secretaries, the head of Medicare and health officials see these really high costs, they are more interested in knowing, 'what policy knob can I turn to stop this hemorrhage?'" said Michael O’Grady of the National Opinion Research Center, co-author of a new report for the Campaign to End Obesity, which brings together representatives from business, academia and the public health community to work with policymakers on the issue.

The data for the new study came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which included information about the moms’ jobs and incomes, as well as stats on their family life, including the decision to give their babies formula or to breast-feed for a short duration (less than six months) or a long duration (six months or more).

But leaving responsibility for financial education solely on parents creates an unequal playing field, Lusardi says. In a paper published in 2009 examining youth financial literacy using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the authors (Lusardi is one) found that "financial knowledge among the young is strongly influenced by family background."

Recent data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) indicate that more than half of people aged 57-85 and about a third of those aged 75-85 are sexually active and that physical health is significantly correlated with sexual activity and many aspects of sexual function, independent of age.

It is not legal to market methamphetamine in America. There are no agencies regulating sales or setting standards. There are no records of transactions or trends. Product quality is uneven and the ways in which meth is delivered to users varies. So it is not surprising that in a recent study of methamphetamine markets across the country we found considerable variation both in the quality of local product and in the organization and operation of local markets.

"Looking at differences among age groups, the largest increases in belief in God most often occur among those 58 years of age and older. This suggests that belief in God is especially likely to increase among the oldest groups, perhaps in response to the increasing anticipation of mortality," researcher Tom Smith said in a statement.

“The Philippines is both developing and Catholic,” said Tom W. Smith, who directs the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. “Religion, which is mainly Catholic, is very emotionally strong there.” The report covered data from 30 countries that participated in at least two surveys in 1991, 1998 or 2008. In 29 of the 30 countries surveyed in 2008, belief increased with age: Belief in God was highest for those ages 68 or older (43 percent), compared to 23 percent of those younger than 28.

The authors recommend using a 25-year budget window instead to fully account for the value of disease prevention. The report was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. NewPublicHealth spoke with Michael O’Grady, PhD, a senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, a lead author and a former Assistant Secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, about the report.

The study is by Jesse D. Rude, a principal research analyst at NORC at the University of Chicago; Gregory C. Wolniak, a senior research scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago; and Ernest Pascarella, the Mary Louise Petersen Professor of Higher Education at the University of Iowa. They used survey data of students at 6 liberal arts colleges and 11 universities collected by the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education.

Winship points to data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, which show that the share of young people with annual incomes of $1 million in 2011 dollars—pocket change to some of these young entrepreneurs—barely changed from 1982 to 2006.

A UNIVERSITY education costs a fortune. Student loan debt in America has been rising rapidly in an effort to keep up with the expense. According to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance 8.9% of households had student debt in 1989, averaging $8,700. In 2007, by contrast, the share had risen to 16%, holding an average of $21,500 in debt. To make matters worse new graduates face a slack job market which could depress their earnings for decades. But what choice do they have? The cost of forgoing university may be even larger.

Let’s say a worker making $50,000 contributes 6 percent of her annual salary with a 3 percent employer match. By the time that person retires, she should have about $320,000 saved up, according to calculations by Munnell. But reality rarely plays out that way. People forget to enroll, or they don’t save enough, or they wind up withdrawing money to cover a financial emergency. The result: Individuals nearing retirement have closer to $78,000 saved, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. (And that number is rosy; the last regular survey was done in 2007, just before the financial crisis.)

This can be an unsettling to hear early in a research career. "Soft money" is a polite euphemism for funding that comes from a source outside a university or research institute and must be pursued regularly and with vigor. The "soft" part means the money can be both uncertain and impermanent, neither of which are adjectives one would like to attach to a job or career. Yet, a large fraction of the research faculty and staff members of American universities and research institutions live every day in this "soft money" world. Those in medical schools, engineering, and the basic sciences are all too familiar with how fleeting and fragile funding sources can be. Congressional budget battles become personal when a large fraction of your research portfolio is funded by federal sources. Foundation funding priorities are also seldom sustained for the long haul.

Added Norman Bradburn, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, “The decennial census is accompanied by lots of publicity and support from various groups which makes it more likely that people will feel it is their duty to respond. This is not the case with ACS which goes on under the radar of most people and media.”

Moderates are typically less educated than either liberals or conservatives, Gauchat said. "These folks are just generally alienated from science," he said, describing them as the "least engaged and least knowledgeable about basic scientific facts." The study was based on results from the General Social Survey, administered between 1974 and 2010 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The findings were based on responses given to the General Social Survey, a long-running sociology project that has been interviewing Americans about their level of trust in public institutions (such as the scientific community, the Supreme Court, and television) since the 1970s.

One panel member, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), asked about NIH's controversial plan to modify the design of the National Children's Study (NCS), which plans to follow the health of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21. Brown said that Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine is running NCS pilot studies in two Ohio counties that are among seven "vanguard" centers that may not be part of the redesigned main study. The school's two NCS contracts employ 60 people, Brown noted.

So many nursing mothers work less or stop entirely. A recent study, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, found that new mothers suffered a drop in earnings in the short term -- whether they breast-fed or formula-fed their infants. But women who breast-fed infants for six months or longer experienced a much starker drop in income over the first five years of their children's lives.

Why do I keep posting this stuff? Because facts matter. That’s my hope, my faith. Tell people facts, and they will open their eyes. Tell your friends, tell your family. Have whatever opinion you want to have, but start with the facts we know. Look up facts, calculate facts, analyze facts. They are there for us, we just need to go look. Google is your friend, Wikipedia is your friend. The General Social Survey is your friend.

For example, "a person with diabetes is not going to go on dialysis right away. They're going to go on dialysis 10 to 12 years after their diagnosis," said NORC Senior Fellow Michael O'Grady, co-author of the report, released Wednesday by the Campaign to End Obesity. A 25-year window for making policy decisions would be more appropriate when drafting policies aimed at curbing disease, he said at a Wednesday morning press conference.

NORC at the University of Chicago followed people born from 1957 to1964 as well as from 1980 to 1984. For both groups, debt -- credit card as well as other personal debt acquired early in life -- was likely to still remain and have grown by 10 percent five and 10 years later, says Rupa Datta, a NORC senior fellow.

No matter what happens, Social Security will not provide enough retirement income for most people. A 45-year old who earns $35,000 can only expect about $16,000 a year from Social Security when he retires. If he earns the median income, about $50,000, he’ll get about $20,000. According to the 2009 Survey of Consumer Finance the median financial (does not include housing) wealth for people approaching retirement is about $70,000. That will provide about $3,500 of inflation-protected income a year in retirement—not much to live on. People need to save more.

Her top concern is for seniors who are entering retirement without any or very little retirement savings. She notes that according to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance, home equity represents 80% of total wealth for one quarter of senior homeowners over the age of 62. They need to use that housing wealth wisely.

In February 2011, researchers led by David Rein, PhD, of the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago in Atlanta, reported that testing all adults born from 1945 to 1965 would be more cost-effective than the current risk-factor approach.

When that wealth is inherited, will it be retained or spent quickly? Results from the NLSY79, a longitudinal survey covering people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s suggest roughly half of all money inherited is saved and the other half spent or lost investing.

Currently, 19 percent of gay men and almost 50 percent of lesbians have a child, according to the the National Opinion Research Center's 2008 General Social Survey. As more states recognize same-sex marriage — Maryland became the eighth this month — while others have murky laws, the number of potential child-rearing headaches are bound to increase, experts say.

But a recent study that charted birth and death dates for 9 million people born between 1875 and 1895 shows the mortality curve was just as steep among the very old all the way up to age 106, when the sample got too small to reliably measure. The study, based on records from the Social Security Administration Death Master File, was published last month by University of Chicago longevity researchers Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova in the North American Actuarial Journal. The National Institute on Aging sponsored their work.

There is a continued, urgent need for effective tobacco-cessation interventions. Tobacco use remains the chief preventable cause of illness and death in our society. It is responsible for inestimable suffering, almost half a million deaths annually, and about $200 billion in added costs for health care and lost productivity each year. Tobacco-use rates in the United States have declined markedly over the past 60 years, yet they now appear frozen at about 20% of all adults, with rates sharply higher among the poor, the least educated, and people who have coexisting mental health conditions or who abuse alcohol or other substances.1 Moreover, although about 70% of smokers visit a primary care physician each year, only about 30% report that they leave these visits having received evidence-based counseling and medication for smoking cessation

Retirees are also tapping into home equity to generate spending money. As a result, debt is rising. According to the Federal Reserve's 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances, 40% of households headed by someone aged 75 or older had debt in 2004, up from 29% in 2001. Not only are many people still paying off the mortgages on their primary residences, but some of them have purchased vacation homes, taking on second mortgages. The U.S. Census Bureau cited 6.6 million vacation homes in the U.S. in 2003. The typical buyer, according to the National Association of Realtors, is aged 55 or older.

And this is precisely what we have. Studies using comparable data from recent cohorts of young people (for example, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and the National Study of Youth and Religion) have found virtually no overall differences on most measures of identity, practice, and belief between those who head off to college and those who do not. The one exception to this is the consistent finding that college graduates attend religious services more frequently than those who do not graduate from college.

But lopsided polarisation is not limited to the make-up of Congress. There's a similar pattern among the population at large. Six years ago, I did an analysis based on data from the General Social Survey (GSS) - the most-used US data source after the US Census. Comparing three time periods - 1972-1984, 1985-1993 and 1994-2004 - I found that conservatives were far more concentrated within the GOP than liberals were within the Democratic Party, and that that concentration increased more rapidly within the GOP. Conservatives made up 49 per cent of the GOP in the period 1972-1984, and increased to 61 per cent from 1994 to 2004. Liberals comprised 32 per cent of the Democratic Party in the first period and ended at 39 per cent.

The result came as a surprise to the study's authors, Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, a husband-and-wife team at the Center on Aging, part of the research center NORC at the University of Chicago. They married in 1975 after he proposed—with a promise he would discover how to halt aging if she would accept.

The average couple in the United States reported that they had sex 66 times annually, according to a study by the National Opinion Research Center. But that number falls to 52 times for couples in their 50s. It's not as bleak as it may appear, however.

I am only in my early 50s, yet I have lost count of the number of grant and contract review committees on which I have served. I wish I could say it is because I am some sort of academic superstar. In fact, it is just the combination of an odd specialization that crosses technical boundaries and a substantially cooperative nature. I always agree when asked by panel officers from the National Institutes of Health for two reasons: I have been on the government side of the aisle, and I desperately need people to review my stuff.

Most college students didn't lose their religion, the authors said, but many reported a drop in outward displays of religiosity. "The religious belief systems of most students go largely untouched for the duration of their education," the authors wrote. "Religious faith lies dormant in students' lives, waiting to be awakened at some point after college, but it is rarely seen as something that could either influence or be influenced by the educational process." A study published last year in The Review of Religious Research and based on 1998 data from the General Social Survey said, among other findings, that education was "unrelated to religious disaffiliation

The study used data from a random sample of 12,686 young adults who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth beginning between ages 14 and 22 and who were between 43 and 51 in 2008. Those who scored the highest on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a series of 10 tests related to intelligence, were the most likely to own a Roth IRA. Some 14.3 percent of people in the highest IQ quintile owned a Roth IRA by 2008, compared with 3.8 percent of all the study participants and just 0.9 percent of people with the lowest IQs.

A study published last year in The Review of Religious Research and based on 1998 data from the General Social Survey said, among other findings, that education was “unrelated to religious disaffiliation.”

Most, however, who receive sudden wealth will do so through more-conventional means. More than nine million households in the U.S. reported getting an inheritance of at least $100,000, according to the latest available data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. Baby boomers—those 78 million people born from 1946 through 1964—are expected to inherit some $8.4 trillion during their lifetimes, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

In any case, going over what I’m going to talk about I was double-checking political breakdowns by atheist & agnostic proportions and ideology in the General Social Survey for after the year 2000. I used the “GOD” variable, which asks people about their belief in God. Those who did not believe, or said there was no way to find out, I classed as “atheists & agnostics.” This means that the total percentages in the population are higher than self-reports; that’s because the word atheism in particular has a negative connotation.

For example, the 2010 General Social Survey found that less than 3% of employees of companies with employee stock ownership, which include the ESOP model and other forms of employee stock ownership, were laid off in 2009-2010 compared to a 12% rate for employees without employee stock ownership. Our national leaders of both parties, need to understand that national policies to encourage employee stock ownership, and new policies to increase ownership among more working Americans, need to be considered as an effective way to ensure our national employment rate is where we all want it to be," stated Keeling.

Mr. Wodtke analyzes the relationship between educational attainment and racial attitudes, using data from Emory University's Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and the University of Chicago's General Social Survey to determine various groups' attitudes about stereotypes, discrimination, and policies. He places his findings in the context of a literature that indicates that education generally has a liberalizing effect, but has not often addressed the attitudes of groups other than whites.

Researchers hope to learn more about these and other factors, including genetics, child rearing and exposure to chemicals, through the National Children's Study, an ambitious undertaking in which researchers are examining the lives of more than 100,000 children from before birth to age 21. The Southern California coordinating center is at UCLA in collaboration with Cedars-Sinai, The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, the University of Southern California, the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, the Research Triangle Institute, the Rand Corporation and several Ventura County organizations.

To test this hypothesis, we use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and panel data techniques and find that obesity is negatively related to arrest. In one specification, for example, we found that the odds of an obese man being arrested are 64 percent of those of a healthy weight man. The social costs of obesity may be overstated if obesity reduces the likelihood of arrest because the obese are less criminally active.

La General Social Survey de la Universidad de Chicago ha elaborado una lista con los diez trabajos más felices del momento. Este ranking destaca porque incluye profesiones que generalmente no están bien pagadas y que responderían a la perfección con aquello de que 'el dinero no da la felicidad'.

One possible step forward would be a change in screening policy for hepatitis C, according to David Rein, PhD, of the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago in Atlanta, and colleagues. Currently, the CDC recommends antibody screening for people with such risk factors or indicators as a history of injection-drug use or elevated alanine aminotransferase levels.

And the older you are, the more money you most likely have invested in it. That means that many of the 40 million senior citizens in the USA own a great deal of it. According to the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, the average net worth of families headed by an individual ages 65-74 is more than $1 million.

That's why the Bureau of Labor Statistic's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1997 is so fascinating. Findings from the study -- called longitudinal because it follows the same group of people over time -- were just released on the education and employment experiences of America at age 24. The study follows a nationally representative sample of approximately 9,000 men and women who were born during the years 1980 and 1984, were ages 12 to 17 when first interviewed in 1997, and were ages 24 to 30 when interviewed for the 13th time in 2009-2010.

Since the early 1970s, white America has become more secular overall, but the drop has been much greater in the working classes.As of the 2000s, the General Social Survey indicates, nearly 32 percent of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 attended church regularly, compared with 17 percent of the white working class in the same age group.

Shega and Dale would like to continue their study of chronic pain’s ties to social engagement by working with longitudinal data from the National Social Life Health and Aging Project (NSHAP), a study by investigators from NORC and the University of Chicago that contains multiple waves of data over five to 10 years and rich social network data. Using this long-term data will allow them to assess whether pain leads to more social isolation, and how the structure of the relationship changes over time.

A new paper, though, finds that mortality deceleration for human beings is a myth. The husband-and-wife team of Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, part of NORC's at the University of Chicago’s Center on Aging, have re-crunched the numbers, examined the assumptions, and found that it’s not the case. The mistake was likely to have been caused by mixing sets of disparate data (combining, say, groups of people with different mortality rates) along with the tendency to exaggerate the ages of really old people.

Specifically, the 2010 GSS, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found that 3% of employees with employee stock ownership, which include the ESOP model and other forms of employee ownership, were laid off in 2009-2010 compared to a 12% rate for employees without employee stock ownership

Due to an error in computation, the odds of living to a ripe old age in the United States are much lower than previously thought, researchers said. Leonid A. Gavrilov and Natalia S. Gavrilova of NORC at the University of Chicago, formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center, said the findings contradict a long-held belief that the mortality rate of Americans flattens out after age 80. The researchers' work explains why the U.S. Census Bureau was wrong when it predicted six years ago that there would be 114,000 centenarians in the country by 2010 when the actual number turned out to be half that at 53,364.

Compared with their married counterparts, single people are more likely to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures. There is much research suggesting that single people get out more — and not only the younger ones. Erin Cornwell, a sociologist at Cornell, analyzed results from the General Social Survey (which draws on a nationally representative sample of the United States population) from 2000 to 2008 and found that single people 35 and older were more likely than those who lived with a spouse or a romantic partner to spend a social evening with neighbors or friends.

But gun safety advocates such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence counter with a regular survey on gun ownership conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, which has been conducted 28 times since 1972, most recently in 2010. It has shown gun ownership declining steadily for years.

THE REPORT presents results from a new, nationally representative survey of 1,630 young married couples: "The Survey of Marital Generosity," conducted by Knowledge Networks in December of 2010 and January of 2011 and funded by the Science of Generosity initiative at the University of Notre Dame. The report also relies on new analyses of nationally representative data from the General Social Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Musick and her colleagues used data from a sample of 3,200 Americans from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a group that was followed from adolescence into adulthood. They estimated the propensity of men's and women's college attendance based on family income, parental education and other indicators of social background and early academic achievement. They then grouped their subjects into social strata based on these propensity scores and compared marriage chances of college- and non-college-goers within each stratum.

In fact, he doesn’t need to worry much about being controversial. Not when his in-your-face denunciation of the $2.6 trillion health care industry is resonating so well with an increasingly frustrated segment of the population. With health costs zooming and no convincing plan in place to curb them, “there is public dislike of Big Pharma and many managed care and health insurance companies,” says Tom Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

More than 70% of small businesses were launched using personal savings or assets, according to Elizabeth A. Duke, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, who, last April, disclosed preliminary data from the Federal Reserve's upcoming Survey of Consumer Finances.

The practice of teachers in classrooms is what matters most when it comes to students learning in school. The principle strategies of school reform -- 'higher' standards, school and teacher 'accountability', intensified testing, and 'choice' -- may affect teacher practice indirectly, but the the relatively poor record of school reform over the last three decades, especially in schools serving low-income students, suggests that those strategies are of no great consequence to the quality of teaching.

"Siblings of centenarians born in September to November have 30 to 50% higher chances to live to 100 years compared to those born in March," says Leonid Gavrilov of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of Chicago, who coauthored the study with his wife, Natalia. He points to a variety of possible causes: maternal nutrition during the last months of pregnancy, seasonal infections, temperature during birth or conception and levels of vitamin D. All may influence the likelihood of health problems later in life.

In light of my previous posts on GRE scores and educational interests (by the way, Education Realist points out that the low GRE verbal scores are only marginally affected by international students) I was amused to see this write-up at LiveScience, Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice. Naturally over at Jezebel there is a respectful treatment of this research. This is rather like the fact that people who would otherwise be skeptical of the predictive power of I.Q. tests become convinced of their precision of measurement when it comes to assessing whether a criminal facing the death penalty is mentally retarded or not.

For the study, Musick and sociologists at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) estimated the propensity of men's and women's college attendance based on family income, parental education and other indicators of social background and early academic achievement. They then grouped their subjects into social strata based on these propensity scores and compared marriage chances of college- and non-college-goers within each stratum. Estimates were based on a sample of about 3,200 Americans from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, followed from adolescence into adulthood.

A 2010 study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that nearly 40 percent of workers whose companies gave them paid sick days still reported going to work with a contagious illness such as the flu.

Tom Smith, a researcher with NORC, a social science research center at the U. of C., said that when the center conducts its survey asking Americans what the country's spending priorities should be, "welfare" often lands near the bottom of the list while "helping the poor" ranks much higher.

Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

Politically, Gallup polls find that the 1% are more likely than the 99% to identify themselves as Republicans (33% to 28%) and less likely to be Democrats (26% to 33%). A survey of 104 wealthy families in the Chicago area, led by Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, found the budget deficit was their leading worry, followed by unemployment; for the broader population, the reverse is true. Still the rich, like most voters, have eclectic views, often supporting liberal and conservative positions simultaneously. For example, Keith Whitaker, who advises wealthy families on behalf of Wells Fargo, says many of them sympathise with the Occupy Wall Street movement. A lot of them became rich by building businesses and consider Wall Street “the place where businesses are taken apart and run by someone else”.

Married people are happier (but, we have to take this with a grain of salt because 1) the stats do not include people who were married and got divorced because they were unhappy, 2) as the study does reference, happy people are more likely to marry.) "...over the 1970's and 1980's, 24% of never-married adults, but 39% of married adults, told NORC at the University of Chicago that they were very happy"

One of the mixed blessings of living through your 50s and 60s is having "senior citizen" status bestowed upon you, whether you want it or not. And the best part of that is observing how some people react to the experience. A Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances that compared family net worth in 2009 with that in 2007 found that net worth had dropped across the board, but had dropped least for those heads of households ages 65 to 74.

Michael Sherraden, the founder of the Center for Social Development, worked with Min Zhan to compile information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, an ongoing survey that takes information from adults born between 1957 and 1964. The two professors studied the links between household assets, debts and success in college for 1,162 students whose parents took part in the survey.

The study analyzed data collected as part of the federal government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The 7,335 participants were nationally representative and ranged in age from 12 to 16 when they were enrolled in the survey in 1996. The first interviews were conducted in 1997. Follow-up interviews have been carried out annually since then. The researchers found that the probability of a first arrest accelerated in late adolescence and early adulthood — at 18, 15.9 percent of the participants reported having been arrested — and then began to flatten out as the youths entered their 20s.

The cutoff for the 1 percent varies depending on how income is calculated. On the low end, an analysis of census data puts the cutoff at $380,000 for a household and provides a wealth of demographic characteristics that were used in this article. On the high end, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which uses a broader measure of income that includes capital gains, yielded a cutoff of $690,000 in 2007, the most recent year of data available. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan group, makes projections based on Internal Revenue Service data and adjusts for people who do not file taxes. It puts the cutoff at $530,000 per tax return in 2011. Even by that gauge, though, $380,000 would still put a family well above the 95th percentile. There is little current data that would allow a measurement of the 1 percent by wealth.

Studies funded by the National Institutes of Health find married couples are more financially secure, which leads to less stress and better recovery from stress when it occurs. Sociologist and NORC Expert Dr. Linda J. Waite calls marriage a “wealth-producing institution” and says spouses benefit from “economies of scale” and shared risks, which lead to better financial and health outcomes.

“Americans have always acknowledged that there are Rockefellers and the lunch-bucket guy,” said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey of NORC at the University of Chicago. “But they believe it is not a permanent caste, but a transitory condition. The real game-changer would be if they give up on that.”

There are many factors that determine an individual's appeal on the mating market, and not surprisingly some of these are sex-specific. In a paper recently published in Hormones and Behavior, Thomas V. Pollet, Leander van der Meij, Kelly D. Cobey, and Abraham P. Buunk explored the relationship between individuals' levels of circulating testosterone and the self-reported number of lifetime sexual partners. They utilized a very large data set (the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project), which consists of individuals whose ages vary between 57 and 85.

One obstacle was the lack of cheap health insurance for Medicare does not kick in until age 65. And many were still paying off school loans for the kids or their mortgage and the biggest reason was they simply had not saved enough to last them possibly another 35 or 40 years. According to the  Survey of Consumer Finances, 37% of 65-year-olds are still carrying credit card debt.

The Survey of Consumer Finances shows that up until the 90th percentile of the distribution, as of 2007, made up around 65 percent of people’s net worth. If you see a massive decline in the value of your home, it is kind of mechanical that if you are thinking about savings and retirement you’ll think, “I was planning on having enough equity in my home when I retire that I could just borrow against it for the rest of my life. Now I don’t, so I have to adjust my consumption path immediately.”

The quest for a state that “looks like America” is understandable, but the reality of lived life is more complex. And not just in racial terms (e.g., the division in politics between the white suburbs of Maryland vs. Virginia on either side of D.C.). But keeping race in mind, one consistent finding in social science is that Americans actually tend to overestimate the number of minorities. Iowa is actually more typical than we think, despite the fact that it is not typical. In the year 2000 the General Social Survey asked respondents to estimate the number of various groups in the USA.

University of Missouri professor Rui Yao analyzed data from the 1989-2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, which is a survey supported by the Federal Reserve Board in cooperation with the Internal Revenue Service. Yao found that risk tolerance also was influenced by the economic climate of the time period. As the economic outlook increased, so did risk tolerance. However, she found that risk tolerance also decreased as the economy slowed. Yao says this is a concerning trend.

Who are Chicago’s super-rich, and what are their spending habits and views on government? A new study from a team of Northwestern University researchers with data from NORC at the Univeristy of Chicago focusing on Chicago’s wealthiest 1 percent set out to answer those questions, and its authors say it’s the first of its kind. Most other surveys have studied on the wealthiest 20 to 30 percent, but never focused on the 1 percent that has drawn the Occupy movement’s ire.

But working out exactly what factors affect happiness is not easy. The data is difficult to gather and the statistics are hard to manage. One of the best sources of data is the General Social Survey, a set of questions about attitudes in the US which has been carried out since 1972. Consequently, it now provides a substantial database for sociologists, demographers and economists studying changes in the way people think and feel in the US.

Researchers at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) analyzed 13 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to understand how and when people in early adulthood have families. The survey began in 1997 and included 8,984 respondents.

But Americans making that amount of money aren't the prime targets of the Occupy protesters and other critics, whose rhetoric is more often directed at the superwealthy, whom they accuse of hiding massive assets in stocks and other investments to avoid paying taxes. (If you're using total household wealth to measure the top 1 percent, membership would begin at about $8.7 million, according to the researchers' analysis of the best available data from the Survey of Consumer Finance.)

A lot of people are furious with a study that shows obese women earn less money than their peers who are normal weight. I know first hand how a lighter body can carry a heavier wallet stuffed with a bigger paycheck. According to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in 2008 women who were obese made an average of $5,826 or 15 percent less than normal-weight females. Critics claim the study shows how obese women carry a stigma and are punished for not upholding the standard for beauty.

Recently, in the New York Times, Mitt Romney warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment.

License plate readers pick up more stolen cars than cops alone, but police units specializing in aut0-theft. How well do they work on the street? In a recent study in the Criminal Justice Review, a team led by Bruce Taylor of the NORC at the University of Chicago center in Bethesda, Md., set up an experiment to see how well license plate readers did in helping police in Mesa, Ariz., catch car thieves. "We did find some increasing effectiveness in stolen plates being picked up," Taylor says. "The surprise in the study was the effectiveness of specialized auto theft units."

Mitt Romney wants to stigmatize most “safety net” spending – the array of social insurance programs from Medicare to food stamps to unemployment compensation to free school lunches — as a form of welfare that is “cultivating government dependence.” The 2-to-1 level of support found for spending on the poor for health care and other social services disappears when voters are asked specifically about welfare, according to the General Social Survey; when that word is used, voters by a better than 2-to-1 margin, 49.3 percent to 21 percent, say that “too much” is spent.

A new academic study finds that, literally, smarter investors prefer Roth IRAs to traditional individual retirement accounts. Contributions to Roth IRAs are not tax-deductible, but withdrawals in retirement generally are tax-free – and there are no withdrawal requirements, as there are with traditional IRAs. A doctoral candidate and two associate professors of personal financial planning at Texas Tech University analyzed data from the 2004 and 2008 “National Longitudinal Survey of Youth” (looking at people who were 14-22 years old in 1979).

This time of year, many people try to reflect on what brings real value into their lives and what their deepest hopes for the coming year might be.  Such thoughts will lead at least some to sobering conclusions about the value of their jobs and career choices.  If recent findings are any indicator, the starkest judgments may well come from the corporate ranks. Among the happiest ten were jobs held by clergy, authors, teachers, and operating engineers (who play with big toys), according to the General Social Survey conducted by the NORC at the University of Chicago.  The ten most hated jobs were populated almost entirely by managers (of sales, marketing, products, and so on), and technical people.

Referrals might be for substance abuse services or mental health counseling, Braverman said. With child abuse or neglect, "we report to the appropriate authorities," she said, but the doctor's responsibility doesn't end there. "We would facilitate referrals for appropriate treatment and support children through that." The new study appears online Dec. 12 and in the January 2012 print issue of Pediatrics. The researchers used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1997 to 2008 for 7,335 young people aged 8 to 23.

The study analyzed data collected as part of the federal government’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The 7,335 participants were nationally representative and ranged in age from 12 to 16 when they were enrolled in the survey in 1996. The first interviews were conducted in 1997. Follow-up interviews have been carried out annually since then.

Obese Americans have smaller paychecks than those who aren't overweight, and this difference is especially strong among women, a new study finds. The analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth revealed that in 2004, overall average annual incomes were $8,666 less for obese women and $4,772 less for obese men compared with normal weight workers.

What do American voters really think about sex and politics? While attitudes toward sexual harassment are still in flux, Americans are strongly against extramarital sex. Indeed, they are more strongly against it now than in the recent past. In the General Social Survey, a national poll of adults conducted biennially by NORC at the University of Chicago, the percentage of Americans who responded that it is “always wrong” for a married person to have sex with someone other than his or her spouse rose from 73 percent in 1991 to 81 percent in 2008.

How often do you hear phrases with the following general undertones: “architecture isn’t a profession it is a calling,” “architecture isn’t a career it is a way of life,” or “architecture doesn’t make life possible it makes it worth living”? Perhaps not that often, but enough that many architects see themselves as uniquely sacrificing aspects of their life for a higher cause. Some claim that architects have high divorce rates, suffer from depression, and endure a special degree of stress that causes early mortality from cancer and heart disease.

Social class also involves self-identification. According to the General Social Survey through NORC at the University of Chicago, which has been asking people what social class they belong to since 1972, more than 90 percent of Americans put themselves squarely in the middle – belonging either to the working class or the middle class.

When the National Opinion Research Center asked people whether they believed the government has a responsibility “to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes,” in 2008, only 37 percent agreed. Forty-three percent disagreed, and 20 percent had no opinion. When pollsters ask people to name the top issue facing the country, almost nobody volunteers inequality.

The report, which came out in early December, compiles data from two big well-known surveys, the General Social Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and another smaller survey including 1,630 married couples called The Survey of Marital Generosity, funded by the University of Notre Dame. The authors found that yes, compared with childless married couples, those with kids have lower "marital satisfaction," a measure sociologists use to determine couples' happiness.

While the skeptics don’t dispute that the raw number of guns, including pistols, has grown, they point to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, which indicates more guns are being concentrated in fewer hands. That poll last year found a third of households claimed to have at least one gun, far fewer than those answering the same question in Gallup’s October poll.

The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center has partnered with the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) to present a series of workshops on city cultural planning. The conversations, which began this fall and continue through spring 2012, provide valuable context and foster dialogue as DCASE leads the effort to create a new cultural plan for Chicago.

Fortunately, the Russell Sage Foundation hooked up with NORC and three Northwesterners, led by Benjamin I. Page (Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making) on the working paper "Wealthy Americans, Philanthropy, and the Common Good," a survey whose 104 Chicago-area respondents—a small sample size, granted, but the one percent is by definition small—fall mostly in the famous, mysterious not-99 percent, with an average wealth of $14 million and a median of $7.5 million.

Three-fifths of young U.S. adults who cohabit eventually get married, researchers say. Dr. Susan Brown, co-director of Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research, said 63 percent of women cohabited versus 57 percent of men. "Today, most marriages are preceded by cohabitation," Brown said in a statement. "It's really become a stage in the courtship process. It's unusual for couples to marry without first cohabiting." Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the study found 61 percent of U.S. adults have formed a family by age 25.

For married couples to stay happy as they grow old together, a healthy and robust sex life is essential, a new study concludes -- and the more sex, the better. In examining the responses of some 238 couples aged 65 or older to the 2004 iteration of the General Social Survey, a national data-collection program focu