UK Gallup Polls, 1955-1991

Jennings, Will (2023). UK Gallup Polls, 1955-1991. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-856398

How have public attitudes on key political, social and economic issues changed since the Second World War? How do those changes vary across different groups in society? From the 1930s to the early 2000s, the survey organisation Gallup conducted around three thousand surveys of the social, political and economic attitudes of the British public. At the time, these opinion polls provided valuable insights on how the public thought about key issues, personalities and events of the day - the government, the party leaders, international crises, support for specific policies, and so on - with national level results reported in monthly Gallup reports and in the news media. To date, only a small fraction of the original surveys have seen the light of day. A recent discovery by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Cornell revealed a veritable treasure trove of important historical Gallup survey data - around 2,500 surveys covering the period between 1945 and 1991 - stored in 'column binary format' based on antiquated IBM punch cards, rendering them inaccessible to most researchers today. Processing and digitising this data presents a major technical challenge, but offers the prospect of enhancing understanding of social and political change in Britain between the 1940s and 1990s.

This project developed a unique dataset of opinion polling by Gallup that enables researchers to analyse dynamics of public opinion in Britain between the 1940s and 1990s. The research team digitised codebooks of Gallup surveys over the period between 1945 and 1991 and converted around 800 individual level surveys. They also created a merged dataset of individual surveys that combines repeated cross-sectional measures of public attitudes and demographics - enabling researchers to track changes in public opinion by subgroup over time. This new data resource allows us to explore long-term trends in social and political attitudes in Britain, their reaction to key events and how they vary across different cross-sections of society.

Data description (abstract)

Individual-level survey data for opinion polls conducted by affiliate organisations of Gallup in the United Kingdom between 1955 and 1991. Researchers with a valid UK academic email address may access the survey data themselves within Roper iPoll. Choose the login button in the upper right corner of iPoll. As your affiliation, from the dropdown menu choose "British Opinion Project (ESRC)" and then select the small red "Register." Insert your valid UK academic email in the next dialogue box in order to be sent an email to choose a password and complete registration. Data accessed under that account will be filtered to the datasets rendered available through this joint project. If you need assistance, don't hesitate to contact the Roper Data Services team in the U.S. via email at data-services@ropercenter.org or via telephone at 00-1-607-255-8129.

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