[MUSIC] Hi, in this module I'm going to introduce the China General Social Survey, an important new resource for conducting social science research on contemporary China. The China General Social Survey, CGSS was originally launched in 2003, was inspired by the General Social Survey in the United States. The GSS in the United States has been in place since the 1970s, originally, it was annual, now biennial. And it's been an important tool for understanding and measuring social change in the United States, in the decades since the 1970s. So the CGSS measures basic social, economic and demographic behavior along with attitudes on a variety of social topics. The GSS is a major dataset for the United States, and the CGSS is emerging as a very important dataset for contemporary China. It has already been used in 700 published papers, talking about contemporary Chinese society. The CGSS originally launched in 2003, as a collaboration between the Department of Sociology at Renmin University, and the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. There were waves in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2008, four waves. Starting in 2010, it was taken over by the National Survey Research Center at Renmin University, and, since then, it's been annual. The data, importantly, are available for download at the China National Data Survey Archive, cnsda.org. Now the characteristics of the CGSS are important, one is that the CGSS is nationally representative. The designers of the CGSS, especially the most recent cycle, followed a sampling strategy that helps guarantee national representative data. Including the use of stratification to ensure representation of specific regions of the country. It's cross-sectional, so it's not a longitudinal dataset, it's cross-sectional. A series of cross-sectional studies annually that put together, give a time lapse portrait of changes in Chinese society. There's more than 10,000 households per wave of the CGSS, so there's a lot of data. A lot of data that allows very detailed analysis of specific questions. It focuses on civilian adults aged 18 and above, so it's a individual survey, not a household survey. And again it's downloadable at the chinagss.org website, where you can also find a lot of history and documentation about the dataset in the survey. So, the core module of the CGSS includes a lot of the same questions that you would see in the American GSS, as well as other social science surveys. Those include basic questions about social and demographic characteristics of the respondents. Their health, their lifestyle, their migration history. There's also attitudinal questions, social attitudes, class attitudes, political attitudes and behavior, as well as actual measures of cognitive ability. Finally, there's employment history, to provide information about labor market behavior, information about social welfare and family. So it's a rich dataset covering a very wide variety of topics sufficient for application in a wide variety of areas. So broadly speaking, the Cycle II of the CGSS is divided into three types of modules. There's a core module which is the same every year, every time that the survey is conducted, the same questions that are asked again and again. So these are repeated annually. These include the standard background variables that I mentioned just a moment ago, demographic variables, family variables and so forth. As well as questions about attitudes and so forth to help measure social trends from year to year. Then there are topic modules, some of which are included for up to five years. For example, there are specific modules focused directly on health, on work, and the economy. And one of the distinctive features of the CGSS is that other researchers can actually propose modules for inclusion. These proposals are reviewed by a scientific community, that decides whether or not to add them to the CGSS for a particular year or set of years. And finally, there are additional modules that may be added in particular years for specific reasons. For one thing, there are modules that are included as replications of models from other international social surveys. So there are major networks of social survey researchers around the world, including the International Social Survey Program and East Asian Social Surveys. Where people run other surveys like the American GSS, or the CGSS which track social trends, social change in different countries. So periodically modules from these other international surveys are included in the CGSS to facilitate comparison between China and these other countries. So some of the topics that have been covered include gender and religion. I mentioned that there were these other social surveys in other parts of the world, I'll mention a few of the ones that are here in Asia. One is the Japanese General Social Survey, which again is available for download. Modeled again on the General Social Survey in the United States, which in this case tracks changes in Japanese society at regular intervals. Similarly, the Korean General Social Survey and in Taiwan, the Taiwan Social Change Survey. So, all of these surveys are designed according to, if not an identical format, at least they share common modules which allow comparisons between these regions. As well as other places where they conduct similar studies that have followed the same standard. Now I mentioned that there are these consortiums that help coordinate the work of these international social surveys. So I wanted to give you the links to help you find more information about these consortiums. The East Asian Social Survey Consortium, coordinates the surveys carried out in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China. And then the International Social Survey Program seeks to coordinate social science surveys carried out around the world in dozens of countries. By agreeing on specific modules that are carried out, in a very wide variety of countries and regions, this allows for detailed international or inter-regional comparisons. So overall, there's an enormous amount of data out there for tracking social change, social trends, and so forth. Not just for China, but for the rest of the world. Offering the prospect of carrying out not just specific country studies, for example, using the CGSS, but also, comparative studies, worldwide studies.
