Conceptualizing and measuring culture in surveys: Values, strategies, and symbols

This article reviews the content and development of a topical module on aspects of culture that appeared in the 1993 General Social Survey. This process drew on many extant survey resources for studying culture, and the interview schedule it produced focused on three elements of culture: personal values, predispositions toward particular strategies for action, and symbolic indicators of group membership such as tastes and activities. Also included were several items measurung attitudes toward cultural objects and figures. Cursory analysis of response distributions for these items reveals a relatively high degree of consensus among Americans regarding the value of self-sufficiency, the efficacy of individual striving, and the virtues of honesty and responsibility in friends. The article concludes with observations about aspects of culture that survey approaches are not well-suited to measuring, and about implications of routine ways of developing surveys for studies of culture.