The European Social Survey (ESS) is a social scientific endeavour to map the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of the various populations in Europe. The average duration of an ESS interview is 60 minutes in British English and data is deposited in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.^[1][2]

Professor Rory Fitzgerald is the Director of the ESS which in 2013 became a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). The headquarters are at City, University of London.

History

The ESS was initiated by the European Science Foundation under the leadership of Sir Roger Jowell and Max Kaase 1995 and established in 2001 at the National Centre for Social Research (now NatCen Social Research) in London.^[3]

One of the reasons to start this new time series of social scientific data was that existing cross-national attitude surveys were regarded as not of sufficient methodological rigour to draw on as reliable sources for knowledge about changes over time in Europe. Since 2002-2003, a total of 40 countries have participated in at least one round of data collection. In the most recent 2020-2022 ESS Round 10, 32 countries are participating.^[4]

In 2013, the ESS became an independent legal entity known as an ERIC^[5][3] and as of 2020 has 25 Member countries and one Observer country. In 2016, the ESS became a landmark of the ESFRI roadmap in recognition of its consolidation.^[6]

There are over 230,000 registered users of the ESS from countries across the world.

Prize

In 2005 the ESS was the winner of the Descartes Prize, an annual European science award.^[7]