Publisher's Synopsis
Britain is, on the whole, a well-documented nation. We know or are able to find out a great deal about our characteristics as a society ? who we are and what we do. But we know much less about our character ? what we think and feel about our world and ourselves. Very little systematic material is publicly available on the nation?s values, whether or how they have been changing and the extent to which different sections of the population vary in their attitudes and beliefs. - - British Social Attitudes compiles, describes and comments upon a range of current social attitudes. The information is compiled from around 3,500 interviews carried out by SCPR among a nationwide sample in an annual series of surveys. The series seeks to chart changes in British social values during the 1980s and 1990s in relation to other changes in society and is core-funded by the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts. - - This volume describes and interprets the social, moral, political and economic attitudes held not only by people in Britain, but also by people in a number of other European countries, mainly fellow members of the European Union. Recent events in Britain and Europe make this an especially important time to take stock of how people in the EU think and feel about their world and themselves. - The British public may feel ambivalent about the EU, but is there anything in particular that sets them apart from their counterparts in mainland Europe? Do they feel differently about family life, or work of social mores? Is Britain distinctive from the rest of the EU in its attitudes ? or more insular perhaps? Or is it more the case that all nations differ profoundly from one another in different ways? These questions are at the heart of this book. - Almost all the data in this book comes from sets of questions (?modules?) fielded by member countries of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), a voluntary grouping of teams from research institutes and universities in all parts of the world.
