Fil. mag. Hans Jörgen Marker
Svensk Nationell Datatjänst
Göteborgs universitet
 

Opinions in the Welfare state: 2011-2015

Project aim and any amendments to this aim during the project period
The aim of the project was to compile, digitize and provide access to the reports and questionnaires created by the Swedish Gallup Institute during its first years.

Project results and a discussion of these results
The scanning was conducted by the Department of Digital Services at Gothenburg University Library and resulted in 321 questionnaires and 424 reports comprising about 29,000 pages. Of these, comprehensive and reader-friendly PDF files, enabling easy downloading of even the larger documents, were created. There is a great deal of variation in report sizes, from two to five hundred pages. In addition, all original files have been retained, stored as high-resolution TIFF files, thus allowing for corrections if needed. So far, no additional scanning has been required.

The questions from the questionnaires were extracted and transformed into text format (by means of OCR), and have subsequently been matched with each report. The discrepancy between the number of reports and questionnaires is due to several reports being of index type, measurements of various kinds, or entirely missing. In the cases where the questionnaire were missing, question texts were copied from the reports. The number of questions per report varies widely, from a handful to several hundred.

A dedicated web portal has been created for the Gallup data. It includes not only the reports and questionnaires, which are searchable by title or question text, but also some history and background to the material and George Gallup, his method and work, and other information of interest. It also contains links to information about events and people in the years of the reports, as well as lists of other research resources from and about the period. Additionally, a page with project information, licensing terms and origin has been added to facilitate users' return to the Gallup archive.

An information leaflet that is distributed along with general SND information has been produced. The 2013 advent calendar, with curiosities from the reports, was presented at SND's website.


Unforeseen technical and methodological problems
The questionnaires were somewhat problematic to match with each report as a questionnaire usually is used for several different studies with different characteristics. This required careful examination to identify the right battery of questions. A further problem was that the quality of the OCR was so poor that all question texts were typed in manually.


Integration into the organization and how the work will be taken forward.
The questions have been integrated in SND's search system, which consists of the catalog of SND's data holdings and the Question Bank. The latter is made ??up of questions from archive data material. Questions from about a third of the stock of data comprising approximately 30,000 unique question texts is entered thus far.

There is a great deal of other material not used within this project. It consists of international correspondence with other Gallup Institutes, clients, newspapers and publications, as well as with interviewers. The client group includes companies, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, with a great variety of products and services, government agencies and other state and municipal entities. Most of this correspondence consists of thin carbon copies that require careful handling. This material will be sorted and be made easily available for further use by interested researchers. There is an office dedicated to Gallup material, equipped with suitable scanner and computer equipment, suited to digitize even this material given its fragile state.

New research questions that have been generated by the project
Since this project is purely technical without scientific ambitions, we have mostly theorized about possible applications which could facilitate future research. One of these is the questionnaires where you can follow the evolution from the first simple forms to more complex and elaborate questionnaires with fairly comprehensive socio-economic background variables. Here you can see which questions were current at the time and how they were put. Child allowance was introduced in 1948, and in March that year questions were put about what the money was used for and whether people liked or disliked the new system of child allowance. Following the spirit of the time, only married and formerly married women were asked how many dependent children under 16 years they had. In April 1948, questions concerned among other things the Marshall Plan, the Swedish connection to a Western European Union, and whether people expected there to be a new war between superpowers. The questionnaires will be presented in a separate section, together with the original scans to make it possible to follow their development. We hope to be able follow up with data from the Foundation for Opinion Analysis, SIFO, in order to provide an opportunity to observe some attitudes and opinions from 1942 to the present day. Along with the series Swedish National Election Studies, from 1956 onwards, this could provide an overview of Swedish political opinion during 75 years in 2017.


Links to own web pages

http://snd.gu.se/sv/gallup