Invitation to tender: Report on measuring the media

The European Social Survey (ESS) ERIC is seeking applications to produce a scoping report that will outline potential methods for measuring the media context during future survey fieldwork periods.

The procurement process opened with the publication of an open Invitation to Tender (ITT) on 25 September 2017, and published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).

The report should review past approaches to measuring media context within the ESS, evaluate possible alternatives and explore the merits and costs of developing a new methodology.

Since 2002, national events that could have had an impact on survey outcomes have been recorded by national teams when they have taken place during fieldwork periods.

In the first five rounds of the ESS, written information on events was registered by national coordination teams but the reporting was not standardised.

Since Round 6 of the ESS, media claims rather than events have been reported, drawn from national newspapers. Media claims refer to statements in newspapers on topics related to the ESS questionnaire.

In this new approach, more countries than before provided information on the national context during fieldwork but there are still large differences in the number of claims.

The reporting of media claims requires a lot of manual effort and claims (as were events) are only collected during the fieldwork period so major events in-between rounds are not recorded.

The scoping study should set out plans to reduce the burden on national coordinators and, if possible, eliminate the need for real-time selection and coding of media material during fieldwork periods.

It should also make recommendations for how the ESS should tackle the measurement of the fieldwork context in future, and produce a draft work package to implement these as part of the next ESS ERIC work programme (2019-21).

Staff at SCP – The Netherlands Institute for Social Research in the Netherlands have overseen this area of work to date and are available to discuss the present approach.

It is hoped that the successful applicant(s) can work with the core scientific team to develop a task or set of tasks for inclusion in the 2019-2021 work programme.

Its implementation will be contingent on future availability of funding and the implementation if commissioned will be subject to an additional open call.

Applications to tender must be received by 12noon on 2 November 2017. The study should be undertaken from 1 January 2018 and completed on 30 June 2018.

For more information on how to apply, visit the Procurement section of the ESS website.

Photo: qvist/Shutterstock.com