Comparing Australian and European attitudes

Analysis of survey responses to the same questions asked to respondents in Australia and Europe were presented at a webinar last week (Monday 20 February).

The webinar - Life in Australia: Replicating the European Social Survey - focused on data collected across Europe by our survey and on an online panel, Life in Australia.

During the webinar, Ben Edwards and Nicholas Biddle (ANU) discussed the COVID-19 Impact Monitoring Program and the role our measures of trust, social contact and income played in its formation.

Julie Lee (University of Western Australia) and Hester van Herk (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) presented analysis of responses to the human values scale section fielded in Australia, the Netherlands and the UK.

Ruxandra Comanaru (City, University of London) assessed data collected via Life in Australia and the European Social Survey (ESS) to compare attitudes in Australia and the UK on a range of topics.

The Life in Australia dataset - harmonised with our data - is openly available from the Australian Data Archive.

Life in Australia is one of Australia's leading panels - it uses random probability sampling to ensure that the online and offline population is adequately represented.

The vast majority of questions included in Round 9 of our survey were fielded on the panel from 17 February to 2 March 2020.

Life in Australia replicated:

• 6/6 items included in Media and social trust (Core module A)
• 41/43 items included in Politics (Core module B)
• 27/42 items included in Subjective well-being, social exclusion, religion, national and ethnic identity (Core module C)
• 9/35 items included in Timing of life (Rotating module D)
• 61/61 items included in Background variables (Core module F)
• 19/32 items included in Justice and fairness (Rotating module G)

As well as Life in Australia, questions first fielded by the ESS have now been replicated by the General Social Survey (United States) and the South African Social Attitudes Survey.

We recently announced that all the East Asian Social Survey members - China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan - will replicate our Round 12 wellbeing module.

Find out more about Australian European Social Survey (AUSSI-ESS) 2020

Visit the resources section of our website

The relationship between the ESS and ANU Social Research Centre was supported by Horizon 2020 projects ESS-SUSTAIN (grant agreement number 676166) and ESS-SUSTAIN-2 (grant agreement number 871063).