Rory Fitzergarld

Rory Fitzgerald is the Director of the European Social survey (ERIC) and the PI for this project. He has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys at City University since May 2004 and became ESS Director in 2013.  He is closely involved in the design, methodology, management and overall coordination of the ESS and leads its Core Scientific Team.  Before that he was a Research Director at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), which he joined in 1999, having previously worked at Gallup specialising in political opinion polls.  Key areas of methodological interest include survey nonresponse, cross-national questionnaire design and pre-testing and survey quality. He also writes on a range of substantive topics including democracy, attitudes towards homosexuality and the decline in traditional attitudes.

Sarah Butt

Sarah Butt, Co-investigator and ESS Research Fellow, City University London, is responsible for the day to day management of the project contributing particularly to data scoping and nonresponse analysis.   A member of the Core Scientific Team for the ESS since 2012, she is closely involved in the substantive and methodological development of the survey including questionnaire design, fieldwork monitoring and nonresponse reduction.   She has experience of working on a wide range of social surveys from her time at NatCen Social Research where, among other things, she was a co-director on the British Social Attitudes Survey 2008-2010.

Jason Dykes

Jason Dykes is Professor of Visualization at the giCentre in Computer Science.

With a background in geography, cartography and geographic information systems, Jason is interested in establishing and communicating spatial variations in survey response rates and their relationships with other geographic phenomena. Jason has worked on a number of novel modes of geovisualization including OD maps, spatially ordered tree maps and sketchy approaches to information visualization. He gave a keynote at GIScience in 2014 and is Conference Chair for IEEE Information Visualization

Aidan Slingsby

Aidan Slingsby, Co-investigator, is a lecturer in Visual and Analytic Computing in the Department of Computer Science, City University London with a background in geographical information science and information visualisation. He has twelve years research experience, some of which was funded by a global insurance broker as part of a research network interested in quantifying and communicating geographical risk. He has been involved in a number of research projects which a novel combination of spatial analysis, cartography and information visualisation to address research questions.

He will be involved in geographically enriching the data, spatial analysis and cartographic/visualisation for presenting the results.

Chris Skinner

Chris Skinner, Co-investigator, Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics, contributing to the design and evaluation of nonresponse weights and related statistical aspects of the project. His research interests include statistical methodology for the treatment of nonresponse in surveys. Previous research projects on nonresponse he has taken part in have included an ESRC-funded  project on “Hierarchical analysis of unit nonresponse in sample surveys” (2007-10), led by Gabi Durrant at the University of Southampton and an EU-funded project on “Representativity Indicators for Survey Quality”(2008-9), led by Barrie Schouten at Statistics Netherlands. Prior to moving to LSE in 2011, he worked for many years at the University of Southampton.

Kaisa Lahtinen

Kaisa Lahtinen, Research Officer, is involved in all aspects of the project. Her research interests include nonresponse in unit and item level and survey structures. She has a masters from the LSE in Social Research methods and has previously participated in a research project relating to labour market outcomes and item nonresponse.

External collaborators

Chris Brunsdon

Prof. Chris Brunsdon from the National Centre for Geocomputation, Maynooth University, Ireland will act as an expert consultant to the project advising on the use of geographically weighted regression and other analysis techniques to explore geographical variation in patterns of nonresponse bias.

Ipsos MORI

We will be working with Gideon Skinner, Research Director, and Sarah Tipping, Statistical Consultant, from Ipsos MORI to carry out the data linkage for the project and assess the impact of data linkage on respondent anonymity. Ipsos MORI conducted the fieldwork for Round 6 of the ESS in the UK.

Project Advisory Group:

Dr. Ineke Stoop, member of the ESS Core Scientific Team, The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP)

Prof. Tom W. Smith, Director of the General Social Survey, National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) , University of Chicago

Dr. Patten Smith, Head of Research Methods Centre, Ipsos MORI

Alun Humphrey, ESS UK National Coordinator, NatCen Social Research

Prof. Peter Lynn, Professor of Survey Methodology, Institute for Social & Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex

Andy Fallows, Methodologist, Office for National Statistics (ONS)

Prof. Richard Webber, Visiting Professor, Department of Geography, King’s College London