European Social Survey HQ

The award-winning and academically driven cross-national project collects survey data biennially measuring citizens’ attitudes and public opinions on a variety of topics across Europe.

Every two years, a questionnaire is conducted in up to 30 European nations. The interview lasts around one hour, and includes core questions asked in every round.

These questions focus on media consumption, institutional and social trust, democracy, government and politics, national and ethnic identity, health and wellbeing, discrimination, immigration, religion, the human values scale and a range of socio-demographic measures.

In each round of the survey, two topics are covered in more depth.

Each round of the ESS is funded by national funding agencies in each participating country.

All data and documentation is available free of charge on the ESS Data Portal. Since 2002, over 230,000 people have completed a short registration to access the data.

Follow the ESS on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

The European Social Survey ERIC is participating in ERIC Forum 2 - a four-year project that brings together European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC) across all scientific disciplines. The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101124559.

ERIC Forum 2 aims to structure the cooperation between ERICs, support the implementation of the ERIC Regulation and services, and consolidate the integration of the ERICs in the European Research Area by deepening the ERIC Forum’s contribution to research policies. The project began on 1 September 2024 and follows on from an initial implementation project.

Infra4NextGen is a €9.75m project being coordinated by the European Social Survey ERIC. The four-year project began on 1 March 2024. The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101131118.

The project will compile existing outputs from key social science research infrastructures to inform the NextGenerationEU recovery plan and European Union youth policy. NextGenerationEU aims for Europe ‘to build a greener, more digital and more resilient future’ with a focus on five key areas: Make it Green; Make it Digital; Make it Healthy; Make it Strong; and Make it Equal.

In each of the five areas, an inventory of relevant items already fielded on cross-national surveys will initially be produced, including Eurobarometer, European Quality of Life Survey, the ESS, Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), European Values Study (EVS) and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Existing data from these surveys will be analysed and summarised to produce a series of policy-relevant tabulations and visualisations with commentary presented in a dedicated online portal.

This initial analysis will be supplemented with new data collected on each topic later in the project via our CROss-National Online Survey (CRONOS) Panel fielded over five waves in 11 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom).

The ESS is a partner in this Horizon 2020 project that aims to develop a systematic greenhouse gas measurement system for urban areas. Coordinated by ICOS - Integrated Carbon Observation System, it will bring together and evaluate the most innovative measurement approaches of greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas and will develop useful tools and services for cities to support their local climate action plans. ESS ERIC is the only social survey research project involved in the PAUL project, as part of a consortium of 31 partners from a range of scientific disciplines. The ESS ERIC will lead Task 1.3: The human dimension of climate policies: economic and behavioural impacts. The project will run until 30 September 2025.

The ESS HQ is also involved in a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK). Survey Futures is implementing a series of tasks to ensure that it remains possible to undertake high quality social surveys in the UK – of the kinds required by the public and academic sectors – to monitor and understand society, and to provide an evidence base for policy, in the future.

ADDResponse

The ADDResponse project analysed Non-Response Bias by looking at auxiliary data. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the project held strong ties with the ESS. ADDResponse matched small-area administrative, commercial, and geo-coded data to the ESS data collected in the UK during Round 6 (2012/13). It aimed to: identify benefits and challenges of using different kinds of auxiliary data confidentially; analyse non-response bias with the help of auxiliary information; and develop corrective models and weighting procedures for non-response bias. Find out more about the project on the ADDResponse blog.

ESS-SUSTAIN European Social Survey Sustainability

A €2.3 million project, ESS-SUSTAIN was funded by the European Commission through its Horizon 2020 programme. The project led to a significant increase in ESS membership, lowered the costs of participation and helped enhance the quality of the ESS datasets. The grant supported activities such as an impact case study in member countries, the appointment of ambassadors to promote the study, an investigation into accessing structural funds to finance membership and enhanced communications activities.

Next Steps in Securing the Sustainability of the European Social Survey (ESS-SUSTAIN-2)

Following the success of implementing ESS-SUSTAIN (grant agreement number 676166), ESS-SUSTAIN-2 began in January 2020 and will run until 30 June 2023. The €4.9m project is being coordinated by the ESS and includes 16 other partners based across Europe. The project will enhance links with other survey research infrastructures; promote ESS data among key European policy makers; consolidate membership to the ERIC and develop existing tools to optimise the implementation of the survey. A key part of the project is the implementation of a 12-country cross-national online survey to inform future plans for online data collection.

European Cohort Development Project (ECDP)

Coordinated by a team at Manchester Metropolitan University, the ECDP will create a specification and business case for a European Research Infrastructure that will provide survey data on child and young adult well-being. The infrastructure developed by ECDP will subsequently coordinate the first Europe wide cohort survey, named EuroCohort. ESS is a partner in the project providing expert input, particularly to issues around infrastructure governance, survey methodology and piloting.

European Research Infrastructure Consortium Forum (ERIC Forum)

This project aimed to provide collective support from existing ERICs to research infrastructures (RI) interested in becoming an ERIC. This includes the development of best practice guidance related to the ERIC legal framework and the creation of a repository for relevant documents - such as internal regulations and rules of procedures - to be made publicly available online. The project ended in December 2022.

European Research Infrastructures in the International Landscape (RISCAPE)

RISCAPE brought together a consortium of organisations to undertake analysis of international research infrastructures for the use of European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), European Commission (EC), OECD and national or regional funding agencies. The objective of the Horizon 2020 RISCAPE project was to provide a peer-reviewed report on the position of the major European research infrastructures in an international context.

Making well-being count for policy

The ESRC-funded research project aimed to sustain public and political interest in the use of well-being data and explore how best to employ this data for policy recommendations. The project holds strong ties with the ESS relying on well-being questions collected in the core questionnaire and in special modules. The project built on four core areas of research in the field: designing well-being indicators based on survey data; analysing subjective well-being nationally and cross-nationally; exploring the well-being of societies; and studying the challenges of using subjective well-being data for policy recommendations. Read the final report: Looking through the Well-being Kaleidoscope.

Research Infrastructure Visibility (RI-VIS)

RI-VIS was designed to increase the visibility of European research infrastructures (RI) to new communities in Europe and beyond. The ESS was one of 13 partners working in the fields of biomedical sciences, environmental sciences and the social sciences on the project, which ended in January 2022.

Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC)

This €14.5m project, which concluded in April 2022, created an open platform where data, tools and training are available and accessible for users of social sciences and humanities (SSH) data. The ESS led on work package 4 of the project - Innovations in Data Production - which realised a number of initiatives associated with the creation of data. It developed a sample management system for high-quality cross-national probability-based online panels. The work package also explored innovations in Computer Assisted Translation and Computer Assisted Recorded Interviewing.

Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS)

SERISS was funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 (€8.4 million). The project brought together the ESS, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA), the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), European Values Study (EVS) and the Wage Indicator Survey. With the support of these partners, the project addressed key challenges in cross-national data collection, to overcome the barrier across research infrastructures, and to embrace the future of social science exploring new ways of data collection.

CROss-National Online Survey Panel (CRONOS)

Part of the ESS-led work package of SERISS, a Cross-National Online Survey Panel (CRONOS) was established to explore the possibilities of using the Internet to collect survey data in future. CRONOS used respondents from Round 8 (2016/17) of the ESS to recruit respondents for a 12-month web panel. The CRONOS panel ran for one year, and respondents completed a 20-minute online survey every other month, which respondents can complete at a time convenient to them, within a two month period. CRONOS data is available on the ESS website.

Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2023

Professor Rob Ford (University of Manchester) delivered the 10th lecture in memory of Sir Roger Jowell at City, University of London on Thursday 2 November.

The in-person and online event was chaired by Stian Westlake, Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2022

Rosie Campbell (King’s College London) delivered the latest annual lecture in memory of our co-founder, Sir Roger Jowell, on Wednesday 12 October 2022.

The event was held at City, University of London and broadcast online. The chair was Alison Park, Interim Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The lecture illustrated the invaluable contribution that the British Social Attitudes Survey and the British Election Study have made to the ability to understand the link between gender and voting behaviour; both surveys that Sir Roger Jowell played a leading role in establishing.

Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2021

Paul Johnson (The Institute for Fiscal Studies) delivered the eighth annual lecture in memory of European Social Survey co-founder, Sir Roger Jowell, on Tuesday 28 September 2021. The event was chaired by new City President, Professor Anthony Finkelstein.

This year’s lecture assessed how inequalities in education and wealth, and between regions, ethnic minorities and generations, have been affected by the Coronavirus pandemic.

Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2020

Sir Michael Marmot (Institute Health Equity) delivered the 2020 Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture - Social justice and health equity - in an online event on Wednesday 16 September 2020.

The Professor of Epidemiology at University College London discussed tackling health inequalities, insisting that policies and interventions must not be confined to the health care system. Sir Michael explained that policies are needed to address the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.

Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2019

Professor Alissa Goodman and Rt Hon David Laws delivered the 2019 lecture - An uneven playing field: the causes and consequences of social inequalities in education - at City on 13 June 2019.

Alissa Goodman of University College London Institute of Education discussed research on inequalities, showing how longitudinal data is being used to understand the causes and consequences of educational disadvantage in the UK.

Speaking to the policy implications of educational disadvantage, Rt Hon David Laws - Executive Chairman of the Education Policy Institute - present findings from research on the evolution of the disadvantage gap, by phase, pupil type and area over the last decade.

A recording of the lecture is available

Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2018

The fifth annual lecture in honour of Sir Roger Jowell was held at the British Academy in London on 21 May 2018. The lecture was delivered by Professor Jane Green of the University of Manchester who discussed her research into the 2015 and 2017 British elections.

Jane Green is Professor of Political Science in the Cathy Marsh Institute for Social Research and the Politics Department in Manchester and belongs to the Scientific Leadership Team of the British Election Study (BES).

The Chair of the lecture was Jennifer Rubin, Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2017

Professor Anand Menon discussed what the vote for Brexit means for the UK and its relationship with the countries who remain a part of the union. As Chair of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative, the Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King's College London offered valuable insight into this critical issue.

The fourth annual memorial lecture was held on 30 May 2017 and chaired by Professor Sara Hobolt, Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the London School of Economics.

A recording of the lecture is available

Seminars

• 11 May 2017: Using digital sensors to understand activity in the home - Nigel Gilbert (University of Surrey)
• 14 June 2017: Assessing the risk of mode effects in surveys - Jo d’Ardenne (NatCen Social Research) and Annette Jäckle (Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex)
• 28 September 2017: Taking the leap… from in-person to mixed-mode surveys - Paul P. Biemer (RTI International and the University of North Carolina)
• 25 October 2017: The development of push-to-web surveys in the UK - Gerry Nicolaas (NatCen Social Research) and Patten Smith (Ipsos Public Affairs)
• 25 January 2018: Using mobile devices to enhance and extend measurement - Mick P. Couper (Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan)
• 22 February 2018: Evidence of the effectiveness of respondent centred survey design - Andrew Phelps (Office for National Statistics, ONS) and Respondent centred survey design: Principles and practice - Laura Wilson (ONS)
• 16 April 2018: Managing survey change: resource trade-offs and quality metrics - Brad Edwards (Westat)
• 24 May 2018: Completing social surveys on smartphones: what should we be worried about? - Tim Hanson, Peter Matthews and Alice McGee (Kantar Public UK)
• 21 June 2018: Probability based on-line panels in Great Britain - Curtis Jessop (NatCen Social Research), Rory Fitzgerald and Gianmaria Bottoni (European Social Survey)
• 6 September 2018: Conducting probability based mixed-mode surveys: Experimental evidence from the European Values Study - Pablo Christmann (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
• 2 October 2018: How web-push surveys are changing survey methodology - Don A. Dillman (Washington State University)
• 11 October 2018: Interviewer effects on response latencies in a face-to-face interview survey - Patrick Sturgis (University of Southampton)
• 8 November 2018: Ethics are everywhere - Helen Kara
• 22 January 2019: Linking survey and social media data: Experiences and evidence - Tarek Al Baghal (Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex)
• 12 February 2019: Adventures in administrative data: Potential, pitfalls and predictions... - Emma White (University of Southampton)
• 14 March 2019: The digital transformation of government - Simon Everest (Government Digital Service, Cabinet Office)
• 23 May 2019: Maintaining response rates: A losing battle? - Edith De Leeuw (Utrecht University)
• 12 September 2019: Sampling vulnerable and mobile populations in household surveys - Dana R. Thomson (Flowminder Foundation)
• 17 October 2019: How should we present ‘Don’t Know’ options in web-surveys? - Bernard Steen (NatCen Social Research), James Thom (Ipsos MORI) and Tim Hanson (Kantar Public UK)
• 28 November 2019: Using mobile apps for data collection - Annette Jäckle (Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex)

Webinars (YouTube playlist)

• 26 March 2020: Growing up in digital Europe: developing the first Europe wide birth cohort survey - Gary Pollock (Manchester Metropolitan University)
• 30 April 2020: Data quality in mixed-device online surveys in the UK - Olga Maslovskaya (University of Southampton)
• 10 June 2020: Evidence-based survey operations - Michael Bosnjak (ZPID - Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information)
• 25 June 2020: Smartphones: collecting better social data - Peter Lugtig (Utrecht University)
• 28 October 2020: Promoting desirable interviewer behaviour in the European Social Survey - Roberto Briceno-Rosas (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) and Joost Kappelhof (The Netherlands Institute for Social Research - SCP)
• 5 November 2020: Within-household selection methods for probability web surveys - Kristen Olson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Patten Smith (Ipsos MORI) and Joel Williams (Kantar UK Public). Chair: Peter Lynn (Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex).
• 18 November 2020: Moving household financial surveys online: Initial research findings - Matt Corey-Bale and Tom Williams (Office for National Statistics, ONS)
• 9 December 2020: From German Internet Panel to Mannheim Corona Study - Carina Cornesse (University of Mannheim)
• 10 February 2021: Response of Understanding Society to the COVID-19 pandemic - Jonathan Burton (Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex)
• 17 March 2021: Transition to multimode data collection: understanding the measurement dimension - Alexandru Cernat (University of Manchester)
• 15 April 2021: Responding to the pandemic: a 3 country self-completion push to web experiment - Rory Fitzgerald (City, University of London)
• 28 April 2021: Learnings from transitioning the British Election Study from face-to-face to push-to-web - Alex Bogdan (Ipsos MORI)
• 27 May 2021: Taking deliberations online - Ceri Davies (NatCen Social Research)
• 23 June 2021: The effect of language of survey administration on the response formation process - Emilia Peytcheva (RTI International)
• 13 October 2021: What was done to adapt the General Social Survey in 2020? - René Bautista (NORC at the University of Chicago)
• 28 October 2021: Measuring Disasters - The role of self-report surveys - Ben Edwards (Australian National University)
• 3 December 2021: Improving web surveys through visual design and usability - Emily Geisen (Qualtrics)
• 27 January 2022: Remodelling social surveys - trade-offs and opportunities - Peter Cornick and Shanna Christie (NatCen Social Research)
• 10 February 2022: Cross-cultural survey pretesting in the digital age - Mandy Sha and Dorothée Behr (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
• 16 February 2022: How to conduct cognitive interviews online - Cornelia Neuert (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
• 6 April 2022: Web survey participation of Millennials - Melanie Revilla (Pompeu Fabra University, UPF)
• 31 May 2022: Methods for including respondent perspectives in the development of multilingual surveys - Patricia Goerman, Yazmín Garcia Trejo and Mikelyn Meyers (U.S. Census Bureau)
• 28 June 2022: Video-interviewing: An effective new way of conducting surveys? - Carole Sanchez (Centre for Longitudinal Studies), Mari Toomse-Smith and Kirsty Cole (NatCen Social Research)
• 14 July 2022: Phone to online mode shifts as part of a cross-national, probability-based annual project - Alexandra Castillo and Patrick Moynihan (Pew Research Center)
• 28 September 2022: Chapel Hill Expert Survey trend file, 1999-2019 - Seth Jolly (Syracuse University) and Ryan Bakker (University of Essex)
• 19 October 2022: Harmonizing survey data across different survey modes - Ranjit Singh (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
• 17 November 2022: Can tablets collect data from people with no internet or limited digital literacy? - Jo D’Ardenne (NatCen)
• 6 February 2023: How Respondent Centred Design can be used to tackle survey challenges - Laura Wilson, Emma Dickinson and Colin Beavan-Seymour (Office for National Statistics)
• 21 March 2023: Measuring sex, gender identity and sexual orientation: Findings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences -Nancy Bates (ret. former US Census Bureau) and Katherine Dalke (Penn State College of Medicine)
• 8 June 2023: Bringing survey methodology to machine learning: Effects of annotation collection methods on training data and models - Stephanie Eckman (University of Maryland)
• 15 June 2023: Designed big data: Augmenting surveys with apps, sensors, and wearables - Bella Struminskaya (Utrecht University)
• 7 September 2023: Survey Futures: Addressing current challenges to assure the future of survey data collection - Peter Lynn (University of Essex) and Olga Maslovskaya (University of Southampton)
• 11 October 2023: Data collection with wearables, apps and sensors - Florian Keusch (University of Mannheim)
• 23 January 2024: Incentives in the Ethnic Minority British Election Study and National Travel Attitudes Survey - Nicole Martin (University of Manchester) and Eva Aizpurua (National Centre for Social Research)
• 22 February 2024: Survey Futures: Thinking about the post-pandemic role of survey interviewers - Chris Charman (Independent HR Consultant), Sierra Mesplie-Cowan and Debbie Collins (National Centre for Social Research)
• 20 March 2024: Revisiting the current state of online probability-based and opt-in survey samples - Andrew Mercer (Pew Research)
• 10 April 2024: What’s the point of asking? A review of the reliability of self-reported measures of sexual behaviour - Ignacio Franco Vega (Independent Researcher)
• 1 May 2024: Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) Programme of UNICEF - Bo Beshanski-Pedersen (UNICEF)
• 12 June 2024: Producing a future proofing UN Handbook on Household Surveys - Haoyi Chen (United Nations Statistics Division)
• 2 July 2024: The Living and Working in Europe Survey - Daphne Ahrendt and Eszter Sandor (Eurofound)
• 22 October 2024: Measuring loneliness in the European Union - Matija Kovacic (Joint Research Centre, European Commission)
• 20 November 2024: Innovation, engagement and inclusivity: A feasibility study for a new UK birth cohort - Lisa Calderwood (UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies)
• 12 December 2024: Cognitive testing in 19 countries to refine the WHO's sexual health questionnaire - Erin Hunter (Clemson University)
• 17 February 2025: Doorstep interactions to drive data: Implementing Knock-to-Nudge (KtN) alongside an Adaptive Survey Design (ASD) for the Transformed Labour Force Survey - Michalina Siemiatkowska and Steven Gilliland (Office for National Statistics)