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The "Trinians" survey
[Page last updated 19 March 2018]
In Feb 1973, Sarah Abrams, daughter of the late Dr Mark Abrams (Director of the SSRC Survey Unit) was a pupil at St Paul’s Girls’ School, London, and editor of Folio, the school magazine run jointly with the boys’ school. She wanted to write something for the magazine about the social and political opinions and attitudes of her fellow pupils, and mentioned this to her father, who arranged for her to come and meet John Hall (Senior Research Fellow) at the Unit. Unable to resist temptation, Mark and John proposed (on strictly methodological grounds, of course!) to use the idea to run a “quickie” survey at the school, in collaboration with Sarah, subject to consent of the High Mistress.
This was within our remit and was justified by the methodological aspect as it allowed us not only to test the layout of a self-completion questionnaire, but also to test some batteries of items used in some of our in-house surveys. This was a real "quickie" survey which took 3 weeks from initial request to preliminary report, and which we undertook mainly because neither of us could resist the opportunity of involvement in an interesting survey! Theu se of "Trinians" is a tribute to the St Trinian's books by Ronald Searle (both author and illustrator). Who says survey research isn't fun?
The following files are available on this site:
Mark Abrams and John Hall
Attitudes of Girls in Senior Forms [pdf]
Internal SSRC SU paper reporting on selected findings (Feb 1973)
Sarah Abrams
Survey (Article in Folio, magazine of St Paul's Schools, Vol 20,1,1973: pdf, 5pp)
Trinians flysheet [pdf] gives full details of the "quickie" survey by John Hall and Mark Abrams: completed by senior pupils at St Paul's Girls' School in Feb 1973, partly justified on methodological grounds,
Trinians questionnaire [pdf] Facsimile of original self-completion questionnaire, a real scissors and sticky tape job, which I had to do at home (on the typewriter I had "rescued" from the Salford Work and Home Survey: see photo in Survey processing before SPSS, the first slide-show for Old Dog, Old Tricks) as I didn't have a typewriter at work! Very tight on space, so no markup for data capture, which had to be done later using a transfer sheet. I have uploaded the marked up version of the questionnaire which shows the location of the data by record and start column (only pencil, but it’s better than nothing).
trinians.dat [txt] contains the original raw data for the survey, transferred from coding sheets. Not all questions were coded or entered.
trinians2018.sav [sav] will be the restored SPSS saved file,(updated in March 2018) complete with correct dictionary information, but some checks are still needed on scores derived from attitude scales. File order of the variables is not the same as questionnaire order: not all questions are coded or entered.
Trinians log [pdf] is a detailed log kept by John Hall in Jan/Feb 2004 during his monumental struggle (as a relative newbie to Windows, Word and SPSS 11 for Windows) to check the data, convert the original SPSS syntax files and recreate the SPSS saved files, work which had been done thirty years previously on the CDC 2000 mainframe version of SPSS in 1973. The result is a major feat of memory and forensic data archaeology.
In Feb 1973, Sarah Abrams, daughter of the late Dr Mark Abrams (Director of the SSRC Survey Unit) was a pupil at St Paul’s Girls’ School, London, and editor of Folio, the school magazine run jointly with the boys’ school. She wanted to write something for the magazine about the social and political opinions and attitudes of her fellow pupils, and mentioned this to her father, who arranged for her to come and meet John Hall (Senior Research Fellow) at the Unit. Unable to resist temptation, Mark and John proposed (on strictly methodological grounds, of course!) to use the idea to run a “quickie” survey at the school, in collaboration with Sarah, subject to consent of the High Mistress.
This was within our remit and was justified by the methodological aspect as it allowed us not only to test the layout of a self-completion questionnaire, but also to test some batteries of items used in some of our in-house surveys. This was a real "quickie" survey which took 3 weeks from initial request to preliminary report, and which we undertook mainly because neither of us could resist the opportunity of involvement in an interesting survey! Theu se of "Trinians" is a tribute to the St Trinian's books by Ronald Searle (both author and illustrator). Who says survey research isn't fun?
The following files are available on this site:
Mark Abrams and John Hall
Attitudes of Girls in Senior Forms [pdf]
Internal SSRC SU paper reporting on selected findings (Feb 1973)
Sarah Abrams
Survey (Article in Folio, magazine of St Paul's Schools, Vol 20,1,1973: pdf, 5pp)
Trinians flysheet [pdf] gives full details of the "quickie" survey by John Hall and Mark Abrams: completed by senior pupils at St Paul's Girls' School in Feb 1973, partly justified on methodological grounds,
Trinians questionnaire [pdf] Facsimile of original self-completion questionnaire, a real scissors and sticky tape job, which I had to do at home (on the typewriter I had "rescued" from the Salford Work and Home Survey: see photo in Survey processing before SPSS, the first slide-show for Old Dog, Old Tricks) as I didn't have a typewriter at work! Very tight on space, so no markup for data capture, which had to be done later using a transfer sheet. I have uploaded the marked up version of the questionnaire which shows the location of the data by record and start column (only pencil, but it’s better than nothing).
trinians.dat [txt] contains the original raw data for the survey, transferred from coding sheets. Not all questions were coded or entered.
trinians2018.sav [sav] will be the restored SPSS saved file,(updated in March 2018) complete with correct dictionary information, but some checks are still needed on scores derived from attitude scales. File order of the variables is not the same as questionnaire order: not all questions are coded or entered.
Trinians log [pdf] is a detailed log kept by John Hall in Jan/Feb 2004 during his monumental struggle (as a relative newbie to Windows, Word and SPSS 11 for Windows) to check the data, convert the original SPSS syntax files and recreate the SPSS saved files, work which had been done thirty years previously on the CDC 2000 mainframe version of SPSS in 1973. The result is a major feat of memory and forensic data archaeology.