Analysis of ISSP environment II survey data using variable clustering

Abstract

Social informatics, as a sub-field of the general field of informatics, deals with processing and analysis of data for social studies. One of the social data repositories is the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) the provides crossnational surveys on various social topic. Previous studies of this data often used a subset of available variables and sometimes a reduced number of records, and most of these analyses have focused on predictive techniques such as regression. In this paper, we analyze the Environment II module of this data set using variable clustering to produce meaningful clusters related to questionnaire sections and provide information to reduce the number of demographic variables considered in further analysis. Case level clustering was attempted, but did not produce adequate results. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.