The European Social Survey: Contents, Design, and Research Potential

Following its establishment in 2001, the academically led European Social Survey (ESS) has become one of the most important and informative resources concerning a broad variety of European populations’ moral, religious, social, economic and political attitudes and behaviours. In addition to its primary goal of tracking changes and stability in European citizens’ attitudes and behaviours, the ESS project also devotes itself to the development and dissemination of advanced standards in survey research. In particular, this applies to questionnaire design, cross-national equivalence of the instruments used and the sampling procedures applied (Jowell et al., 2007; Kohler, 2007; 2008). Designed as a biennial survey in its original blueprint, the ESS has by now been conducted in more than 30 European countries and currently offers data from the first six waves of the survey (2002–2012), including information and answers of approximately 300,000 respondents in total (at the time of writing, fieldwork for the seventh wave of the ESS has just been completed). Its integration of a variety of socially relevant topics, broad coverage of European countries and a growing number of time points make the ESS an increasingly suitable data source for single-country as well as cross-national analyses with time-series analysis now starting to become feasible. For policy makers and scholars from various disciplines and fields of interest alike, the ESS therefore provides a unique and innovative resource on the (changing) social, political and economic conditions in Europe at the outset of the 21 century.