Blueprint Reports
As a strategic and priority activity, the scientific Blueprint for a ’European Social Survey’ has now been published both in its full and summary versions. The Standing Committee for the Social Sciences (SOC (formerly SCSS)) is currently considering the implementation stage of the Blueprint at the national council level.
Copies of the reports are available upon request from the ESF Office and online:
The European Survey (ESS) - a research instrument for the social sciences in Europe. (76 pages - 268 KB).
Report (full report and summary versions) prepared for the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences of the ESF. (Published June 1999)
Both the summary version and the full report are available in an html format click here
Press Release (issued 14.06.99)
Programme Brochure (Published March 1998)
More about the programme
During 1996, an ESF expert group recommended that a blueprint for a European Social Survey should be drawn up. The broad aim of the survey would be to provide like-for-like data on social and political attitudes across Europe. The expert group envisaged that the new survey would provide systematic and regular data on topics of major interest to both social scientists and policy makers. It would complement, rather than duplicate or compete with, existing data collections from other sources such as national bureaux or the European Bureau of Census (Eurostat). The group identified some key issues that need to be taken into account in
- Research focus: the general theme of the survey should be ’Monitoring the Political and Social Beliefs of Europeans’. Specific topics include social inequality, values, national identity, quality of life, political and economic orientations, ’Europeanisation’ and mass media behaviour.
- Comparative and complementary data: the ESS should provide comparative data that complements data collections carried out at a national and European level. It should also be academically innovative through a theory-guided combination of macro and micro data.
- Probability sampling: potential respondents should be chosen on the basis of probability sampling. The populations chosen should include individuals of a particular age resident in a given country, in private households, at a given point of time. Bearing in mind operational and financial costs, biannual surveys should be conducted.
- Steering and managing the survey: separate committees should be established to look at the content of the survey and its methodology.
ESF publishes a blueprint for a European Social Survey
The ESF publishes today (14 June 1999) a ‘Blueprint for a European Social Survey (ESS)’ in both a fully specified and summary version. The ESS has been two years in preparation and has drawn upon the expertise of leading social survey researchers from 18 European countries. Through providing a European comparative database, the ESS is designed to fulfil the equivalent need for the social scientist that the ‘large infrastructure facility’ does for the natural scientist. An ESS will be a flexible infrastructure facility in the social sciences that will be made accessible to researchers through the existing data archives and other research facilities. With this initiative, the ESF Standing Committee for the Social Sciences (SOC (formerly SCSS)) hopes to achieve a major innovative step in fostering comparative analysis of European citizens’ values and attitudes in the face of political, economic and social change.
SOC (formerly SCSS) Chairman, Professor Robert Erikson (Sweden) says of the ESS – "This strategic initiative is built upon the assumption that designing a research instrument to produce data addressing European perspectives, rather than constructing data from existing, mainly national, sources will prove to be an economical and reliable strategy for future research. A range of ‘modules topics’ would be chosen from which comparative analysis could achieve substantial research gains and policy insights, for example, on topics such as social mobility, values, quality of life, social inequality and xenophobia".
The ESS combines concerns for both international comparison and the study of mid-to-long term change. Its design will involve interviewing independent cross sectional samples of people in each wave of the survey, conducted once every two years, with a common set of core questions being asked in each wave. The ESS will also include up to three research topic modules that will be repeated over much longer time intervals. Groups of researchers will be invited to submit proposals for designing these topic modules. Professor Max Kaase (Germany), Chairman, ESS Steering Committee emphasises the importance of this "bottom-up" element in the ESS – "This is why the idea of setting up a European Social Survey has met with so much enthusiasm by those who over the last couple of years have been involved in getting this project off the ground. Some researchers have drawn an analogy with the space shuttle which permits a wide range of experiments from different disciplines and many different research groups".
A large and innovative venture such as the ESS requires intensive methodological and quality control. It is important that the ESS routinely monitor and assess the implementation and effect of the questionnaire, sampling design and non-responses. Professor Roger Jowell (United Kingdom) Chairman of the ESS Methodology Committee notes that – "Too often, the strict standards used for national surveys are suspended in cross-national studies. Because international studies are more complex and involve cultural differences, there is a reluctant acceptance that methodological purity has to be sacrificed for the sake of mutual respect and practicability. With the ESS blueprint we have not turned a blind eye to these issues. Our goal is to aspire to the highest possible standards".
In Dublin today (14 June) the SOC (formerly SCSS) will present the ESS Blueprint to a meeting of ESF Member Organisations with the recommendation that in the coming months they reach a decision to fund the first survey wave from 2001. The total funds for each survey wave (6.9 MECU every two years) is envisaged to be raised from a mixed funding basis involving the national research councils covering the national survey costs and the European Commission covering the central costs (via the Fifth Framework Programme).
