The data for this particular paper was taken from the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS is an almost annual survey that is conducted through personal interviews of US households. (www.icpsr.umich.edu/gss) The strong points of the GSS is that it is very much so a general survey it covers subjects ranging from abortion to income to zodiac signs. Also, within each subject it covers multiple aspects in order to get as close to the respondents true opinion as possible. In addition to its generality and it’s preciseness the GSS is conducted with a large number of individuals every year giving a large amount of data to work with.

One draw back of the GSS however is with the exception of demographic questions all the other questions are attitudinal. This limits the ability to find why an individual may have a certain opinion that is uncharacteristic of what would be expected in comparison to similar individuals. By this I mean, if for example a person who is an older female that is Catholic but uncharacteristically pro choice where abortions are concerned, may have other life experience that affected this opinion. However the GSS doesn’t ask questions about past life experiences just attitudes.

For all statistical calculations listed within the results section the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used.