European Social Survey (ESS) Austria

The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted across Europe since 2001.

The survey measures the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations in more than thirty nations. The main aims of the ESS are:

• to chart stability and change in social structure, conditions and attitudes in Europe and to interpret how Europe’s social, political and moral fabric is changing;
• to achieve and spread higher standards of rigour in cross-national research in the social sciences, including for example, questionnaire design and pre-testing, sampling, data collection, reduction of bias and the reliability of questions;
• to introduce soundly-based indicators of national progress, based on citizens’ perceptions and judgements of key aspects of their societies;
• to undertake and facilitate the training of European social researchers in comparative quantitative measurement and analysis;
• to improve the visibility and outreach of data on social change among academics, policymakers and the wider public.

A group of IHS researchers under the leadership of Peter Grand constitutes the National Coordination Team for the European Social Survey (ESS) for Austria since 2014.

The country-specific datasets as well as a cumulative data file are available on the European Social Survey Website (Data & Documentation).