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Raymond T. Smith Copyright 2000: All Rights Reserved Go To Site Map |
The idea for the Social Opportunity Survey grew out of the dissatisfaction felt by some members of the Urban Family Life and Poverty Project team over the deficiencies of the main sample survey. Apart from the fact that the survey questionnaire was growing to unmanageable proportions, it was difficult to see how the most important information about the life experiences of the target populations was to be obtained through narrowly focussed questions. Even more important was the fact that no provision could be made in such a questionnaire for exploring informant’s own concepts of race, status, class, and similar crucial areas of social life. In work done previously in Jamaica I had used a short "Locating Survey" as a means of getting a general idea of the social characteristics of various urban neighbourhoods, and as a means of finding individuals who would be good informants for a more intensive study of kinship (see Smith 1988, p. 17). This survey instrument became the basis of the interview guide used in the Social Opportunity Survey. In the original instrument used in Jamaica the questions were designed to be general and non-threatening, in the hope that they would act as a stimulus for individuals to provide their own thoughts and opinions on the issues raised. The same principle was used in designing, in collaboration with Joleen Kirschenmann-Muhs, Matthew Lawson and Loïc Wacquant, the Social Opportunity Survey interview guide. The actual survey was, then, an open-ended questionnaire survey carried out during the summer of 1987, and designed to elicit statements that could be analysed to get at the concepts of class, race, status, social opportunity, and social isolation among a small sub-sample of the main NORC survey population. The interviewers, who were all students and mostly graduate students, were instructed to let the respondents talk without undue interruption. One hundred and sixty-eight individuals were interviewed. All interviews were tape-recorded and the interviewer had to type up the interview immediately afterwards. A template was provided with responses keyed to question numbers, but the interviewers were asked to create new sub-numbers for interesting ancillary information. Although the interviews were written up in a word processor (we used XyWrite), they were soon afterwards transferred into a free-form database named ASKSAM (Access Stored Knowledge by Symbolic Access Method). In spite of our misgivings about the division of the urban population of Chicago into blacks, whites, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, we were obliged to follow the categories established for the main survey and thus the data here are presented in that way. Each individual interview has been "sanitized" by the removal of all identifying information, and the question numbers have been replaced by the text of the actual questions wherever they are relevant. The survey transcripts are listed under their original four headings of African Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and whites, though the reader may wish to break out of those categories and compare the cases individually. To navigate these survey files, scan through the tables which list each case with an identifying case number, the sex and age of the person interviewed, and their occupation at the time of the interview in 1987. Confidentiality considerations require that files not be made available except to persons with an approved research interest. To obtain access to the complete array of cases, please send an e-mail request to me at r-smith@uchicago.edu outlining the project on which you are working and the auspices under which it is being carried out. I will then relay the request to the custodians of these files at the Social Science Research Data Library. In the near future more permanent procedures for accessing these files will be in place and noted here. Because the cases presented here are simple text files it would not be possible to perform the kind of comparative extraction permitted by the original database, even if access to these files were granted. However, the original database files can be made available to research scholars under certain circumstances. Application procedures are discussed elsewhere.
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