Survey Sample International 2012 Cultural Tastes Dataset

Survey Sample International (SSI) 2012 Dataset

Cultural Tastes, Social Demographics, and Aesthetic Perceptions of Americans

Collected by Omar Lizardo & Sara Skiles

Overview

Welcome to the repository and documentation website hosting the Survey Sample International 2012 (SSI-2012) dataset. This comprehensive dataset was collected by Omar Lizardo (UCLA, formerly University of Notre Dame) and Sara Skiles (University of Notre Dame) as part of a national sociological study investigating the cultural tastes, preferences, social stratification, and aesthetic perceptions of Americans.

This dataset provides a rich public resource for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in the sociology of culture, consumption practices, and social demographics.

Dataset Scope & Key Topics

The SSI-2012 dataset covers a wide array of cultural, aesthetic, and demographic measures from a national sample of 2,276 Americans:

1. Music Genres and Preferences

  • Genre Tastes: 1–4 ordinal rating of liking/disliking for 20 distinct music genres (ranging from Classical, Opera, and Jazz to Bluegrass, Hip-Hop, Indie, and Heavy Metal).
  • Listening History: Binary check-all-that-apply indicators representing whether the respondent listened to each of the 20 genres in the past month.
  • Favorite Genre: A single categorical measure identifying the respondent’s favorite genre among all 20 options.

2. Cultural Stereotypes: Typical Fan Characteristics

  • A massive, multi-dimensional grid of 320 variables (20 genres × 16 social characteristics) capturing the respondent’s perceptions of the “typical fans” of each music genre.
  • Social dimensions include gender, race/ethnicity, education, age, and social class (e.g., whether a typical fan is female, college-educated, white, working-class, etc.).

3. Aesthetics & Painting Conformity Experiment

  • The survey embedded an experimental design measuring aesthetic judgments. Respondents were shown an abstract painting and asked for their first impressions (taste1).
  • They were then randomized into control and treatment groups and given social information about whether a reference group (varying in education and occupation) liked or disliked the painting (alterlike).
  • They were asked how similar they felt to that group (similarity) and then asked to re-evaluate the painting (taste2). This allows researchers to model social conformity, taste mobility, and symbolic boundary-drawing.

4. Comprehensive Social Demographics

  • Detailed respondent-level demographics including:
    • Gender, Age, and Census Region of Residence.
    • Race/Ethnicity (self-reported and individual indicators).
    • Education level (individual degree achievements and parents’ college education status).
    • Current employment status and detailed occupational categories.
    • Pre-tax annual income and subjective social class self-identification.

Dataset Cleanliness & Integrity

This distribution contains data that has been comprehensively cleaned and properly labeled for immediate scientific use: -All categorical and ordinal variables have embedded Stata and SPSS value labels, and are converted to standard R factors in the primary R format. -Variables have been documented in a fully automated, interactive data dictionary. —

Citation & Citation Guide

If you use this dataset in a scientific publication, paper, presentation, or class project, please use the following citation:

NoteRecommended Citation

Lizardo, Omar, and Sara Skiles. 2012. Survey Sample International (SSI) Cultural Tastes Survey. [Dataset]. Distributed by https://github.com/olizardo/SSI-2012.

For LaTeX users, here is the BibTeX entry:

@misc{lizardo_skiles_2012,
  author       = {Lizardo, Omar and Skiles, Sara},
  title        = {Survey Sample International (SSI) Cultural Tastes Survey},
  year         = {2012},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/omarlizardo/SSI-2012}},
  note         = {Accessed: [Date]}
}

License

This dataset is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to share, copy, redistribute, and adapt the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.