Call for online panel questions now open

The European Social Survey (ESS) has today (Tuesday 4 August) issued a call for questions to be asked in a new online panel, scheduled to be fielded in 12 countries during 2021 and 2022.

The online panel – due to begin in some countries in April 2021 – will comprise six waves of 60 questions that will each take participants around 20 minutes to complete.

Applications are invited of up to 15 questions to be asked in a single wave, or 20 longitudinal questions to be asked across all waves (e.g. 5 questions asked in wave 1 and repeated in waves 2, 4 and 5).

Waves 1, 2, 4 and 5 will include proposed questions selected as part of this call, as well as a similar call for questions that will be published on the ESS website early next year.

This initial call will primarily cover questions to be included in waves 1 and 2, though we welcome applications at this stage from research teams who would be interested in undertaking a longitudinal study.

Successful applicants for the four waves will be chosen to work with the ESS in order to develop a module of survey questions which would then be fielded on the panel.

The deadline for applications is 5pm (UTC+1) on Tuesday 29 September 2020.

We will be selecting modules which aim to address key academic or policy concerns in Europe, which will add significantly to scientific knowledge and will have wide appeal within academia and beyond.

We would particularly encourage submissions that address the European Union’s Horizon Europe’s missions as well as applications which help to foster interdisciplinary research between European Research Infrastructures.

Submissions which help to address issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its wider impact will also be considered, though we have selected two modules (of 10 items each) on COVID-19 to be included in our Round 10 (2020/21) face-to-face survey.

Question proposals should be underpinned by a theoretical model and coherent conceptual framework.

The CROss-National Online Survey-2 (CRONOS-2) panel is a developmental activity aiming to build expertise in cross-national online data collection.

Panellists will be representative of the online population in each country and will be recruited at the end of upcoming face-to-face (or video) interviews, due to begin in September 2020.

CRONOS-2 will be fielded amongst respondents in Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

It builds on the success of the pioneering CRONOS panel, implemented in three countries – Estonia, Great Britain and Slovenia – during 2016-18.

The data from the panel will be linked to data from our main questionnaire at the individual level and will be released to the entire scientific community without any privileged access.

The web panel is funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 project, ESS-SUSTAIN-2 (grant agreement number 871063).

Professor Rory Fitzgerald, Director of the European Social Survey ERIC, stated

“This is a unique opportunity to have questions included on an input harmonised, cross-national web panel in so many countries. As well as providing questionnaire space to the social science community and beyond the CRONOS-2 web panel also marks an important milestone in the development of methods for on-line cross-national survey methods”.

Full details of the call and how to apply