Conference Agenda

ESS data in Portugal has been collected since 2002, which makes it one of the most reliable and quality sources of data on values and attitudes regarding a broad variety of social issues. With this session we would like to invite Portuguese researchers to reflect on the 20 years of ESS and to present their own work, whether on a country specific level as in a cross-country level analysis. With this session we want also to pay tribute to João Ferreira de Almeida, member of the ESS Scientific Advisory Board (2002-2017), deceased in 2022, for his leading and decisive role on the participation of Portugal in the ESS since the beginning of the project.

The analysis of social inequality is a perennial topic in sociological research. In particular, it is attracting renewed interest in European countries against the backdrop of the recent inflation crisis. We want to know what is the state of social inequality in European countries. In this session we will invite and discuss recent papers on educational inequality, social mobility and homogamy based on the European Social Survey. We are particularly interested in the following questions: How has educational expansion shaped educational inequalities? How do educational inequalities differ by institutional background (educational institutions or welfare systems)? What analyses are available on the use of unidimensional or multidimensional approaches to operationalize social origin with the European Social Survey? Do countries show similar or different patterns in absolute and relative mobility rates? How has homogamy changed across European countries?

Since the last decade of the 20th century, as digital technologies began to spread, research on inequalities, social impacts and effects of the use of these technologies began to be developed. This has highlighted the great importance of research on digital transformation, which is concerned with the economic and social effects of integrating digital technologies into people's lives. The expansion these technologies has unevenly across society. The term digital divide was coined as early as the 1990s, to describe inequalities referred to the access and uptake of digital technologies. Differences in access to digital technologies is what was called the first digital divide, which later on, gave rise to other types of divides, such as the divide on digital skills. Likewise, digital technologies play a crucial role in numerous aspects of daily life, such as education, communication, leisure, or work. As a result, is of crucial importance to understand how these technologies are affecting individuals’ well-being given that the ultimate effect of the integration of technologies in all aspects of our lives would be in our well-being. At the same time, our society is also undergoing a green transition, and social concern about climate change is a central issue. In this sense, it is of particular interest to understand how this green transition is related to the digital transition and, at the same time, how individuals' environmental perceptions and concerns affect their levels of well-being. In this framework, this session welcomes proposals using the ESS and related to one of the following two research topics: (1) Digital inequalities and individuals (2) Digital transition and environmental perceptions (3) Environmental perceptions and well-being. Of particular interest for this session are proposals of cross-country analyses using the ESS Round 10 rotating module on "Digital social contact in work and family life", investigating the causes of inequalities in digital skills and their relationship to well-being. Also, proposals that try to shed light on how the use of digital technologies such as the internet affect people's well-being, using variables from the Media and social trust and Subjective well-being categories. Finally, proposals analyzing how people's environmental perceptions are related to and affect the digital transition and individuals' well-being, using variables on environmental perceptions, such as those included in Rounds 10 and 8. Proposals focusing on topics other than the above, but related to the digital transition, well-being or environmental perceptions, are also welcome.

Round 10 of the European Social Survey (2021-2022) included a rotating module on European’s understandings and evaluations of democracy, largely replicating a previous module applied in Round 6 (2012- 2013). At the time, Europe was going through one of deepest economic and financial crises on record. However, the results and their analysis showed that, in spite of very large variations in how Europeans evaluated the performance of their democracies, the way they conceived “democracy” pointed to a widespread support for liberal and electoral institutions, even if complemented with equally important demands for economic equality and, to a lesser extent, for opportunities for a direct say in policymaking through referendums and initiatives. A lot has happened in the following decade, including a refugee crisis, referendums with unprecedented outcomes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, accompanied by an underlying expansion of EU intervention in domestic politics. At the same time, radical right-wing parties have seen their electoral fortunes improve all over the continent, as the use of populist rhetoric deepened and increased. In countries such as Hungary and Poland, full fledged populist governance and a rule-of-law crisis has taken hold, with both domestic and Europe-wide consequences. How have these developments affected Europeans’ views and evaluations of democracy? This session welcomes paper submissions addressing how views and evaluations of democracy in Europe can be mapped today and how they - and their underlying sources - have changed in this last decade, resorting to the rich and high-quality data of ESS’s Round 6 and 10. For Round 10, the original module was adapted to allow the measurement of conceptions and evaluations not only along the liberal democratic, direct democratic, and social democratic dimensions, but also along the dimension of populist democracy, a view that stresses vertical over horizontal accountability and a unrestrained responsiveness to a sovereign “people”. How has this enriched our knowledge about how Europeans understand “democracy” and evaluate the performance of their regimes? We welcome papers both on the substantive topic - conceptions and evaluations of democracy in Europe, their causes and implications - and on the methodological challenges involved in assessing them.

Because of technological, demographic, cultural, and global processes, work is undergoing transformations in forms and social meanings. There has been an increasing internal segmentation within the labor market, particularly in terms of differential access to contractual stability and, consequently, varying access to income continuity. Moreover, work not always seems able to guarantee protection from the risk of poverty (i.e poor work). In addition, technological innovations and processes of educational expansion are reshaping the distribution and the very content of professions. The increasing internal segmentation of the labor market and discontinuity in job careers are factors that contribute to individuals within the same occupational groups having varying social and economic conditions. Therefore, an increase in social fragmentation and a weakening of the pivotal role of work in the construction of social and individual identity is being under discussion. The European Social Survey (ESS) stands as an invaluable database for empirically testing hypotheses concerning the decline of the centrality of work in shaping individuals' values, attitudes, and beliefs. Firstly, the ESS boasts an extensive repository of survey data with an extended temporal coverage that enables researchers to trace societal changes and trends over time. Secondly, the ESS encompasses a substantial number of countries allowing for comparative analyses. The inclusion of various cultural, economic, and political contexts enhances the robustness of findings and enables researchers to identify general patterns, including the role of different institutional arrangements. Consequently, the ESS's combination of longitudinal and cross-national perspectives makes it as the quintessential database for empirically scrutinizing hypotheses pertaining to the centrality of work in affecting individuals' attitudes and beliefs about societal issues such as, e.g. human values, social exclusion, welfare state, social inequality social trust and trust in institutions, authoritarianism. The session aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the evolving relationship between work and values and attitudes over time and across different countries by inviting scholars to exploit the great potential of the knowledge basis provided by ESS data. The session especially welcomes contributions: Adopting a comparative and/or longitudinal perspective. Considering job position in the labor market encompassing its various aspects: employment form, status, and sector, occupation. Merging ESS data with other datasets allowing multilevel analysis also including the impact of institutional arrangement. that consider the contribution of institutional arrangement.

In the past few years, large-scale surveys such as the ESS have faced issues with declining response rates and escalating costs associated with conducting surveys (Brick and Williams, 2013; de Leeuw, Hox and Luiten, 2018). In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed researchers further to experiment with other methods. As a result, many of these projects (e.g., the EVS or the GSS) have started introducing self-administered modes and using a mixed-mode design as an alternative to traditional face-to-face data collections. Particularly, push-to-web approaches (Dillman, 2017) have so far been the most promising. While the primary method of the ESS remains face-to-face, the ESS has a clear objective to transition to a mixed-mode setting in the upcoming period. The use of multiple modes may come with benefits (lower costs, increase in response rates, decrease in certain types of sample biases), but can be a source of measurement error at the same time. Mode effects can impact time trends or introduce additional measurement error in county-level comparisons. Thus, understanding the consequences of mode shifts and finding optimal mixed-mode designs are critical to the ESS. In this session, we invite contributions which provide insight into the impact of survey mode on measurement errors or present findings related to mixed-mode design choices and questionnaire design.

The European Social Survey provides a unique opportunity to study prejudice and perceived discrimination against social minorities across time and varying societal contexts. Its extensive coverage of a range of topics and populations enables the exploration of innovative research questions, contrasting socio-cultural realities and individual perceptions of minority groups. How are the attitudes of the majority reflected in the minorities' experiences and perceptions of discrimination? How does the temporal and regional context interfere in this association? These types of multi-level and cross-level relations offer crucial insights into psychosocial processes and intergroup relations. Furthermore, with its large and representative samples, the ESS facilitates the adoption of intersectionality perspectives, illuminating the unique experiences and various outcomes among a large variety of granular minority groups. It helps addressing the issue of multiple jeopardies. Simultaneously, there has been a significant change over the past two decades concerning perceived discrimination. Activist movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have heightened individual sensitivities to issues of discrimination. Additionally, there has been a transformation in societal norms related to reporting experiences of discrimination in the social media. The question remains as to how these shifts are reflected in the population and to what extent is varies across minority groups and societal contexts. Therefore, this session invites papers focusing on the perceived discrimination of minority groups and potential outcomes, considering contextual factors and/or employing an intersectionality approach. We also welcome submissions that contribute methodologically by critically examining how perceived discrimination and prejudice are operationalized in the ESS. This includes considering the multilevel interplay between time period, societal context, and individual factors, or by addressing intersectionality.

Environmental issues are not only ecological but also social and cultural impacts. To address them effectively, we need to understand how human societies interact with the environment. This session highlights the importance of social science in environmental research and vice versa and invites contributions that explore how interdisciplinary collaboration can lead to innovative and sustainable solutions. We welcome researchers from various disciplines who have used data from the European Social Survey for interdisciplinary research related to environmental issues.

ESS data in Portugal has been collected since 2002, which makes it one of the most reliable and quality sources of data on values and attitudes regarding a broad variety of social issues. With this session we would like to invite Portuguese researchers to reflect on the 20 years of ESS and to present their own work, whether on a country specific level as in a cross-country level analysis. With this session we want also to pay tribute to João Ferreira de Almeida, member of the ESS Scientific Advisory Board (2002-2017), deceased in 2022, for his leading and decisive role on the participation of Portugal in the ESS since the beginning of the project.

The population of Europe and other OECD countries is aging rapidly, which means that exploring various challenges faced by retirees is crucial for developing both robust theoretical models as well as effective policies. Different types of pension systems may expose older individuals to increased risk of poverty. Moreover, the transition to retirement and aging are linked to various stressors, including changes in living conditions, family forms, and access to social networks. The aim of this session is to discuss the research on various facets of life after retirement. We focus on issues related to: 1. Pension systems and old-age poverty; 2. Family forms and financial and psychological well-being of the retirees; 3. Trust and old-age social exclusion; 4. Unionization of retired workers.

Environmental issues are not only ecological but also social and cultural impacts. To address them effectively, we need to understand how human societies interact with the environment. This session highlights the importance of social science in environmental research and vice versa and invites contributions that explore how interdisciplinary collaboration can lead to innovative and sustainable solutions. We welcome researchers from various disciplines who have used data from the European Social Survey for interdisciplinary research related to environmental issues.

Welfare state policies have proven to be an important buffer to the adverse effects of economic crisis, as we have observed during the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding how citizens perceive and interact with the welfare state, especially in times of crisis, is therefore of paramount importance. Recent reviews (van Oorschot, Laenen, Roosma & Meuleman, 2022; Roosma & Laenen, 2023) demonstrate how the literature on welfare state attitudes has - in large part by virtue of the welfare attitudes modules of the European Social Survey - burgeoned over the past few decades. While this has vastly improved our understanding of Europeans’ welfare attitudes, important knowledge gaps remain. These include, most notably, (1) expanding the search for the determinants of welfare attitudes in new directions, for example by analyzing the impact of knowledge and lived experience, (2) exploring attitudes towards new types of welfare policy, like eco-social policies, Social Europe and universal basic income, (3) adopting a more longitudinal perspective on how welfare attitudes evolve over time in different contexts in both the short and the long term, and (4) investigating the consequences of welfare attitudes, for example on actual welfare policies and discourses. This session invites papers that contribute to improving our understanding of welfare attitudes and their causes and consequences, using data from the European Social Survey and/or the CROss-National Online Survey (CRONOS) Panel.

This session seeks answers to the question how the acceptance of gay couples has changed in different countries in Europe over the last two decades. The European Social Survey (ESS) may provide good answers to this question because it included a core item measuring homophobia from the very beginning: “Gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish”. This was complemented in 2016 by two additional items (“If a close family member was a gay man or a lesbian, I would feel ashamed”; “Gay male and lesbian couples should have the same rights to adopt children as straight couples”), which allow us to measure the acceptance of lesbians, gays, and their families in several dimensions. The nature of the ESS database makes it suitable for both temporal and cross-country comparisons. Cross-country comparisons are very important in this field, since acceptance of same-sex couples, family members and of adoption by same-sex couples vary widely across Europe. As several studies have pointed out, there is almost a demarcation line across Europe between different attitudes towards gay people. In addition, in some Eastern and Eastern Central European countries, “patriotic pronatalism” is on the rise. This specific form of pronatalism encourages childbearing only within a certain framework: a favoured subset of heterosexual relationships. This phenomenon could further reinforce divisions in terms of acceptance and rejection of same-sex families in Europe. In this session, in addition to comparative research, we also welcome research that analyses attitudes towards same-sex couples from a new perspective: for example, how negative attitudes towards voluntary childlessness might be associated with adoption by same-sex couples, or what factors might link homophobia to anti-immigration attitudes. Moreover, presentations of methodological applications regarding how to measure homophobia by comparing it via different international databases are also welcome.

This session will showcase research that analyses ESS data, exclusively or alongside other sources, to map societal change and stability. This session will focus on inter-generational relations, what drives volunteers, work and family life and modern cohabitation practices.