An Extract Program for the General Social Surveys

At this site, you can retrieve Extract, a program which permits easy data extraction from the General Social Surveys, and also the GSS data themselves in single year files. Written by Jesse Reichler and Dean Savage, Extract runs on PCs under DOS and is intended for use at sites where mainframe access is frustrating or difficult.

With Extract, you can select variables and years from the 1972-1994 General Social Surveys and then write variable definition and data files for use with SPSS, SAS, QSTATS, or dBASE. You can also output ASCII data files and variable lists. The questions from the GSS codebook have been integrated into the program to permit examination of question wording while making your selections.


You can retrieve the zipped versions of Extract and the General Social Surveys by clicking on the appropriate links below. The data are available in single year files; each year takes between .2 to .6 megs in zipped format. To decompress the files, you will need pkunzip.exe, which is also retrievable here.