Mode Effects and Temporal Continuity in the General Social Survey: Mode-Specific Weights for 2022 and 2024

The 2022 and 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) were fielded as multimode studies in which respondents completed the survey via face-to-face interview (FTF), telephone, or self-administered web questionnaire. We motivate and describe the construction of mode-specific post-stratification weights for the FTF/Phone and web subsamples of these two survey years. These weights reproduce, within each mode subsample, the same weighted population totals on demographic raking variables as the full GSS sample. Using these weights, we show that across 143 subjective attitudinal items spanning eight substantive domains, FTF/Phone estimates are substantially closer to the 2016–2018 historical baseline on 70% of variables, while web estimates are closer on the remaining 30%. This pattern is domain-specific and persists after demographic adjustment, indicating that mode differences are not fully attributable to compositional differences between mode subsamples. The mode-specific weights and all R code used to construct them are made publicly available at https://github.com/restyfufunan/gss-mode-weights.