The ESS

General information about the ESS

The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted every two years across Europe since 2001. The ESS was awarded European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) status in November 2013. It is directed by a Core Scientific Team led by Rory Fitzgerald from City, University of London (UK) alongside six other partner institutions:

• Centerdata, Netherlands
• GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germay
• Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research, Norway
• The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP), Netherlands
• University of Essex, UK 
• University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

The ESS measures the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations in more than thirty nations.

The main aims of the ESS are:

• to chart stability and change in the social structure, conditions and attitudes in Europe and to interpret how Europe’s social, political and moral fabric is changing,
• to achieve and spread higher standards of rigour in cross-national research in the social sciences, including for example, questionnaire design and pre-testing, sampling, data collection, reduction of bias and the reliability of questions,
• to introduce soundly-based indicators of national progress, based on citizens’ perceptions and judgements of key aspects of their societies,
• to undertake and facilitate the training of European social researchers in comparative quantitative measurement and analysis,
• to improve the visibility and outreach of data on social change among academics, policy makers and the wider public.