Thesis Title: Who Answers What to Which? A Critical Examination of Survey Items in Measuring Public Attitudes Towards the British Welfare State Using British Social Attitudes Survey Data
Abstract: The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) is a rich dataset that enables the examination of attitudes towards poverty, inequalities, and the British welfare state spanning four decades. Analysis of the data has led to important findings around such attitudes, including that the belief that income differences are too high has significantly exceeded public support for redistributing incomes from the better-off to those who are less well off, each year since the survey was first carried out in 1983.
However, while numerous studies have explored attitudes toward poverty, economic inequality, benefit-recipients, and redistributive policies by government using survey items from the BSAS, there is little scrutiny on whether such items adequately represent the concepts they are claimed to measure, differences in meaning across survey items, and how the British population vary in their answers within and across survey items, by important socio-economic and demographic factors such as age, income, education, and gender.
Given that unaccounted differences in the usage of survey items and results across studies have the potential to compromise the validity and comparative depth of findings, the research aims are as follows: 1) to review and synthesize the usage of BSAS survey items within and across studies, 2) to utilise BSAS survey items related to attitudes towards poverty, inequality and welfare state attitudes to examine the overlap in meaning between items and 3) to analyse how socio-economic and demographic factors affect responses to these items. Through a mixed methods approach, the goal in these regards is to garner a more comprehensive understanding of such attitudes and provide a framework for future analyses to grapple with welfare state attitudes in a consistent manner.
Primary Supervisor: Prof Ben Baumberg Geiger
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