Draft — permission request to NORC

To: GSS@norc.org (cc: contracts@norc.org) From: Ben Domingue, Stanford Graduate School of Education Status: DRAFT — not sent

Subject: Permission request — reposting item-level GSS responses in an open research archive

Dear GSS team,

I direct the Item Response Warehouse (IRW, https://itemresponsewarehouse.org/), a public archive of harmonized item-level response data used for psychometric and measurement research. The archive currently holds roughly 2,900 tables drawn from published studies, each reformatted to a common standard so that methods work can be run consistently across many datasets.

I am writing to ask what would be required to include item-level responses from several GSS modules in the archive, and whether NORC would be willing to grant permission to do so.

What we would like to include. Item-level responses from the following waves and modules:

Wave	Module
1988	Science, religion, and spiritualism
1989	Occupational prestige ratings
1993	Music tastes
1996	Economic attitudes
2006	Perceived causes of mental illness
2016	Job ideals; government spending; trust in institutions

What “included” means in practice. For each module we would host a table containing one row per respondent-item pair: a respondent identifier, an item identifier, and the numeric response. We do not host respondent demographics, geography, weights, or any other GSS variables, and we do not host anything that would support re-identification. We would not redistribute GSS data files as such — only the reformatted item responses for the specific modules above.

Attribution and provenance. Every IRW table carries the originating citation, a link to the original source, and an explicit license field, all shown to users alongside the data. GSS tables would be attributed to NORC at the University of Chicago with the standard GSS citation, and would link back to the GSS site as the authoritative source. We would record whatever license or permission terms you specify, and would state them on every page where the data appears.

Why we are asking. NORC’s terms state that no part of the contents of NORC websites may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted without express written consent. We read that as covering what we would be doing, which is why we are requesting consent rather than proceeding on the basis that the files are publicly downloadable. The archive already includes 111 datasets held under case-by-case permission from their originators, so this is a route we use routinely.

What the data would be used for. IRW exists to support methodological research — comparing measurement models, testing psychometric assumptions at scale, and similar work. It is non-commercial and freely accessible. The GSS attitude modules are of particular interest because they have been central to a line of work on relational/correlational class analysis, and because they differ structurally from the Likert self-report instruments that dominate the archive.

We would of course be glad to work within whatever constraints you would want to place on this — a subset of waves, specific attribution language, a stated license, or a review of the tables before they are posted.

Thank you for your time, and for maintaining the GSS.

Best regards,

Ben Domingue Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University itemresponsewarehouse@stanford.edu

Notes for Ben before sending

Verify the module/wave list. These come from the paper’s Table 8 descriptions, not from GSS documentation directly. Worth a sanity check against the GSS variable index.
Occupational prestige (1989) may warrant separate treatment — it is a 1–100 rating task rather than a survey attitude battery, and may sit under different documentation. See 04_per_module_ingestion_notes.md.
The framing here is reconstructed, not precedent-based — see README.md.
Consider whether to mention Redivis explicitly as the hosting platform; I left it out to keep the ask simple, but NORC may want to know where the data would physically sit.