When someone goes public with a simple, straightforward, good idea, the audience usually scratches its collective head and wonders why no one thought of it before. That was my reaction as I read James A. Davis and Tom W. Smith′s short volume on the General Social Survey (GSS), the first of a new Sage series on major social science data bases. . . . I suspect there isn′t a GSS user out there who wouldn′t learn quite a bit from reading...