National identities inform behaviours and shape social relations, with evidence for changes both in majority and minority identities in recent years with respect to self-reported identity choice and the meaning people ascribe to it. Combining different identity measures and positioning of the questions might help better understand the meaning respondents ascribe to listed identity categories. This experiment aimed to study whether affective priming and question order of a set of national identity questions are associated with a change of identity choice and meaning.
Respondents were asked a multiple-choice national identity question and an affective Britishness question (importance of being British). Those respondents who chose “Other” as a national identity were also asked a follow-up question to list their other national identity. Half of respondents were asked the national identity question(s) first; the other half were asked the affective Britishness question first.
Respondents were asked follow-up questions on the importance of identity and their political views on Brexit and Scottish independence. These questions were adopted from questions used in previous waves of Understanding Society.
The controlling variable, equally allocated at the household level, is on record o_hhsamp_ip:
ff_identityw15 (1/2 each, allocation stratified by sampleorig ff_gridmodew15 ff_incentw15 ff_infcarew15)
1 = Importance of being British first
2 = National identity first
The variables affected by this experiment are in the file o_indresp_ip:
schlwtl, scbritida, scnatidoa_code, scnatidob_code, scbritidb, scwhorurac, vote1, vote2, vote4, vote4_all, vote3, vote3_all, eumempast, scotuk2, scnatida1, scnatida2 , scnatida3, scnatida4, scnatida5, scnatida6, scnatida97, scnatidb1, scnatidb2, scnatidb3, scnatidb4, scnatidb5, scnatidb6, scnatidb97
