The European Social Survey: Monitoring Social Change in Europe since 2002

UEF's Data-Driven research seminars continue

Professor Heikki Ervasti from the University of Turku will give a talk on the title 
The European Social Survey: Monitoring Social Change in Europe since 2002.

The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven comparative social survey designed to chart and explain the interaction between Europe’s changing societies and the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of its diverse populations. Since 2013, the ESS has held the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) status.

The ESS forms a biennial time series starting from 2002, now working on the 11th Round in 2022/23. Within the past two decades, the ESS has acquired an established position as one of the most important data sources in social sciences and related fields. A multidisciplinary research community consisting of approximately 200.000 social and political scientists, statisticians, economists, geographers, psychologists, health researchers, etc., from all over the world use the ESS data. The ESS data covers more than 35 European and surrounding nations.

The ESS employs extremely rigorous methodological standards in sampling, question-testing, translation and field-work procedures, and continuously develops survey methods and conducts methodological research. The data sets are immediately and freely available in the internet for all with no restrictions. The ESS has served as a data source for thousands of journal articles, conference papers, books and other publications. In my presentation, I will review the starting points of the ESS, methodological features of the ESS, discuss the multiple ways of using the data, and show some examples of recent ESS-based research, especially in the field of welfare state research.

Bio: Heikki Ervasti is professor of social policy in the University of Turku. He has worked within the ESS as the Finnish PI and National Coordinator and since 2002, and the Finnish PI in CRONOS-2, which is the first comparative internet panel survey based on representative random samples in the 9 participating countries. Ervasti’s main research interests include Europeans’ social and political attitudes, wellbeing in comparative perspective, and comparative welfare state and labour market research.

Chair: Antti-Jussi Kouvo, email antti.kouvo@uef.fi.

Please see more on the Data-Driven Research Collaboration Group at UEF.