City renews agreement with European Social Survey (ESS) • City, University of London

City, University of London will continue to host the European Social Survey (ESS) headquarters for the 2025-29 period.

By City Press Office (City Press Office), Published Wednesday, 22^nd May 2024

City, University of London will continue to host the European Social Survey (ESS) headquarters for the 2025-29 period.

The ESS is a cross-national academically led survey conducted every two years across Europe to measure the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of respondents on a wide range of topics.

The project has been embedded in the university since 2003, currently within the School for Policy and Global Affairs and linked to the Department of Sociology.

Last month, it was announced that the survey will receive €10,000 as the recipient of the Kohli Foundation Infrastructure Prize for Sociology 2024.

The 2025-29 agreement was made by City and the ESS General Assembly – a body formed of representatives from all the survey’s funders in all participating countries.

Since 2013, the ESS has been a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) – a legal entity funded by organisations in participating countries, with national government backing.

The agreement also means that the ERIC will continue to be hosted in the United Kingdom (UK), following the UK’s association to the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme on 1 January 2024.

Since the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU), the UK was still guaranteed funding for the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, but Horizon Europe funding was dependent on association status.

In the meantime, Horizon Europe funding was underwritten by the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on behalf of the Science, Innovation and Technology and its predecessor, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

All ERICs must be hosted in EU Member States or countries associated to the Horizon Europe funding programme.

The 2025-29 agreement also included the four-year re-appointment of ESS Director, Professor Rory Fitzgerald.

City, University of London’s President, Professor Anthony Finkelstein CBE, said:

City, University of London is very excited about the opportunity to host the ESS ERIC headquarters for their 2025 to 2029 period.
We strongly share the mission and vision of the ESS and there is a clear alignment between our University's strategic research objectives and those of the survey.
We greatly appreciate the intellectual contribution the ESS ERIC makes to our institution and, more broadly, to the research community.

Professor Fitzgerald added:

I am delighted that after years of post-Brexit uncertainty, the UK is now able to continue as the host country of ESS ERIC.
Our HQ at City, University of London has provided ESS with the leadership needed to provide high quality data to European social scientists. I am very grateful for the support that the ESRC and City have provided and will continue to provide to our infrastructure.
On a personal note, I am very excited that my own mandate has been renewed and I look forward to overseeing the data collection transformation of the ESS to becoming a self-completion survey.

About the ESS

The ESS has been mapping attitudinal and behavioural changes in Europe’s social, political and moral climate for over 20 years. Launched in 2001, the first round of surveys was conducted in 2002/03 and gathered results from 22 countries. Since its inception, 39 countries have taken part in at least one round of the ESS.

Each round includes around 250 questions - the vast majority have been included in all 10 rounds conducted over 20 years (2002-22).
As a result, the ESS always includes questions measuring ancestry; education; employment; financial circumstances; household composition; and other socio-demographics including gender and parental information.

Attitudinal data collected in every round focuses on climate change and energy; crime and justice; democracy and government; immigration; health and wellbeing; institutional and social trust; media and internet use; European, national and ethnic identity; perceived discrimination; political affiliation, interest and participation; religion; social exclusion; and values.

By asking these same questions of a sample of respondents who represent each country’s entire population every two years, comparisons between countries and over time can easily be made.

In each round of the survey, two additional topics are covered in more depth, following an open call to academics working in any scientific discipline.

The ESS has asked questions designed in collaboration with external academics on citizen involvement; health and care; economic morality; family, work and wellbeing; timing of life, personal and social wellbeing; welfare attitudes; ageism, trust in the police and courts; democracy; immigration; social inequalities in health; attitudes to climate change and energy; justice and fairness; and digital social contacts. Some of these topics have been repeated at a later stage.

In rounds 1-9 and 11, survey data was collected via hour-long face-to-face interviews undertaken by survey agencies or research institutes in each country. Due to national measures implemented to help prevent the spread of Coronavirus, Round 10 was conducted using self-completion methods in some countries.

The ESS Strategic Plan 2024-29 sets out plans to change the mode of data collection: from face-to-face interviews to self-completion methods only. It formalises a phased transition, with Round 12 (2025/26) data collected in parallel modes: half the sample in each country will be interviewed through in-person interviews, with the other half completing online or postal questionnaires. This will allow for mode effects to be fully considered ahead of a full transition to only self-completion data collection in Round 13 (2027/28).

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) remains the single biggest funder of the ESS, supported by funding agencies in 30 other European countries.

Other funding for some projects has been provided by the European Union through its Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. The ESS has recently begun coordinating a €9.75m Horizon Europe project: Infra4NextGen.

ESS data is available completely free of charge for non-commercial use – data can be accessed and analysed online or downloaded for use in statistical software programmes such as SPSS, Stata or R via the ESS Data Portal. Data is now available from almost 500,000 interviews.

Since the first dataset was released in 2004, over 230,000 people have registered to access data. Internal analysis of Google Scholar from 2003-22 found that 6,585 English academic journal articles, books, chapters, conference papers or working papers include significant analysis of ESS data. The Overton database of policy documents discovered 3,246 policy documents from 355 sources in 57 countries that referenced the ESS.

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