Human Understanding Measured Across National Surveys: An Introduction

INTRODUCTION: Working with multiple public opinion surveys requires formatting and merging different datasets. HUMAN Surveys does this for hundreds of surveys with the aim of crowdsourcing further development. This approach is necessary given the amount of data currently available and expected to be released.
METHOD: The first version formats surveys from 19 sources, representing over 8 million respondents from 160 countries between 1962 and 2016. It merges data into respondent, country-survey, and country-year datasets and creates common variables. Example applications investigate trends by country and effects of economic globalization, income inequality, and political corruption.
RESULTS: Merged datasets currently include satisfaction with democracy, support for democracy, perceived electoral integrity, generalized social trust, and basic demographics. Data visualizations highlight the potential of this resource and contrast it with selected national indices. Globalization tends to increase satisfaction while inequality and corruption tend to decrease it, but with differences between socioeconomic groups.
DISCUSSION: Using more data enables answering new research questions with greater reliability, robustness, and generalizability. Future releases will format more variables from more survey sources to expand the scope and usefulness of the resource. One aim of merging datasets is to use them for meta-analyses following systematic reviews.
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