European Social Survey (ESS) ROUNDS 9, 10 & 11.
Dates: 2018–24
Funding Organisation: Irish Research Council
Principal investigator: Dr Micheál Collins, Asst. Prof. (Social Policy) with colleagues at the UCD Geary Institute and UCD School of Sociology.
Background
The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted across more than thirty countries in Europe every two years since its establishment in 2001. This survey provides invaluable data on a wide range of topics that tap into key issues facing contemporary Europe. Investigating public attitudes in such a wide range of European countries every two years and disseminating the results without delay enables governments, policy analysts and scholars to keep up to date on social trends that affect how democracy is working and how European citizens perceive their lives, their nations and the world.
What kind of topics does the ESS questionnaire include?
- Citizen involvement and democracy
- Moral and social values
- Trust in institutions
- Social capital and social trust
- Immigration and asylum
- Family and working life
- National, ethnic and religious identities
- Economic morality
- Political values and engagement
- Perceptions of the life course
- Crime and personal security
- Household circumstances
- Attitudes to welfare
- Financial circumstances
- Attitudes to and experience of ageism
- Education and occupation
To illustrate how Dr Collins and his UCD colleagues are utilising these ESS data, the following papers were presented at the 4th international ESS conference entitled Turbulent Times in Europe, Instability, Insecurity and Inequality (University of Mannheim, 15-17 April 2019) and draw on preliminary findings from Round 9 data:
- One of the papers considers Job security in Ireland before and after austerity. This paper analyses changes to perceived job security in Ireland between 2004 and 2010 and explores the relationship between these changes and the wider austerity-driven labour market changes that occurred over the period. The results are then discussed in comparative perspective observing other European countries where similar policies were adopted. The analysis links to contemporary Labour Market Policy issues including job precarity, work insecurity and adequate earnings.
- Another paper focuses on Attitudes to immigrants in Ireland with a focus on trends in immigration and the business cycle and provides two possible explanations for patterns and trends in attitudes to immigrants: (1) the ‘economic competition’ approach, which emphasises the impact of macroeconomic trends in general, and labour market conditions in particular; and (2) the ‘ethnic/cultural conflict’ approach, which asserts the importance of the scale of immigration or the relative size of the immigrant population. The paper draws on a range of questions about people’s perceptions and attitudes to immigrants collected in each wave of the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2016. The methods used include multivariate models of attitudes to migration, controlling for relevant covariates from the ESS data. The models also combine the ESS data with macro-level indicators to capture the business cycle (unemployment and economic growth) as well as trends in the scale of immigration (flows and stocks differentiated by region of origin). The analysis links to current policy issues relating to the successful integration of new migrants into Irish society and compares these experiences to the approaches adopted in other EU states
Data from ESS-10, collected during 2021/22 in 31 European countries, will be available from early 2024. The data will facilitate further comparative research on the evolving structure of European society and the attitudes, outcomes and policy influences within and across states.
Publications
O'Connell PJ, Collins ML, Creighton MJ, and da Silva Pedroso M (2020), Irish Social Attitudes in 2018-19: topline results from round 9 of the European Social Survey. Dublin, UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy. https://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/ess/ESS_Geary_Round9.pdf
The National Coordinating Team at the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin, in partnership with the Irish Research Council, is pleased to present the first national report ever produced for the European Social Survey in Ireland. Without peer, the European Social Survey has recorded the perspectives, aspirations, and concerns of the Irish population for nearly 20 years. Ireland has participated in each round of the biannual survey since the first (2002). This report offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the main findings of the 9th round, which was collected by face-to-face interview between late 2018 and early 2019.