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Conception and Goals of the ALLBUS Survey Programme

The German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) is a biennial survey that has been conducted since 1980 on the attitudes, behaviour, and social structure of persons resident in Germany. A representative cross-section of the population is questioned using face-to-face interviews. As a service to social scientific research and teaching, ALLBUS data are disseminated to all interested persons and institutions as soon as the data and documentation have been prepared.
ALLBUS is a substantively rich and methodologically sophisticated database which can be used for a variety of analytical purposes:

  • to describe and analyse attitudes, behaviour and social structure of Germans with up-to-date cross-sectional data,
  • for longitudinal analysis of German society (ALLBUS time series, replicated questions from other survey studies),
  • for international comparative analysis (ALLBUS includes questions also asked in the American General Social Survey (GSS) and in the ISSP),
  • to examine methodical issues (eg. checking for context effects, question effects, nonresponse).