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Search & Variables
You can use the Variable Search Page to browse all variables in the GSS dataset, or to find variables to answer your research question. Let’s start this example with a question: Has the correlation between income and happiness changed in the past 10 years?
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Step One
First, enter the keyword “income” and the search returns 79 results.
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Step Two
At this point, since there are so many results, you can apply the year filter to narrow the results to those that occur only in the years you wish to analyze. Now, there are 39 results.
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Step Three
You can view the variable description and can click to view the original question to find the variable you need. For this example, we’ll choose rincome. Check the box to the left of the variable name and the variable will be added to your cart.
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Step Four
Now, for happiness. Enter the keyword “happiness” and the search returns 16 variables. Here you can quickly scan the results to see that only two variables will provide data for the time period we are researching.
We want to study general happiness, and will put HAPPY in the cart.
Exploring and saving variables is that easy. Once you’ve saved variables, you can analyze data using tools on the GSS Data Explorer or extract data to use in your own statistical software package.