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Minutes from the General Assembly, Utrecht 2025

Tuesday 15th July 2025, 17.15-18.30, Utrecht (The Netherlands) and online.

  1. Minutes from the 2023 General Assembly 
    The minutes of the 2023 General Assembly are approved.
  2. Report of the President (Vera Lomazzi)
    The President, Vera Lomazzi, reported to the Assembly the activities carried out by the board in 2023-2025. In particular, she mentioned changes in organisational aspects aimed at improving governance structure, to preserve continuity, GDPR compliance, and a new system for sharing and archiving information in the board. She mentioned new collaborations and networks such as the collaboration with WAPOR (through joint travel grants and exploring the possibility of a WAPOR/ESRA joint Conference in 2027), and the Network of European Survey Research Infrastructures, which comprises the European Social Survey (ESS), the European Values Study (EVS), the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE), the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofond), and the Joint Research Centre (of the European Commission) (JRC). Vera Lomazzi mentioned the increase in the number of activities that ESRA sponsors and the organization of the ESRA board within sub-committees, to distribute responsibilities and ensure that key functions are not dependent on a single person.
    She also highlights the continuation of the ESRA podcast series, with a four-episode podcast series with Tom Emery, a five-episode podcast series with Barry Schouten, and a new podcast series currently in preparation with Alessandra Gaia.
    ESRA has also launched the 1st ESRA Summer School, which took place in Ljubljana in July 2024. The Summer School was jointly organised with the Centre for Social Informatics, at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Participation was free of charge for 25 applicants resident in  the following countries: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo and North Macedonia. ESRA has also sponsored the GESIS Summer School 2025 (4 scholarships), the General Online Research Conference 2025 (2 scholarships), the European Establishment Statistics Workshop 2025 (£1,000), the GESIS Summer School 2024 (4 scholarships), the General Online Research Conference 2024 (2 scholarships), and the RECSM Summer Methods School 2024 (2 scholarships). Support for early career scholars has also increased from 10 to 15 Travel & Stay Grants. ESRA and WAPOR have also started a programme of joint support with the ESRA-WAPOR Student Support Awards.
    ESRA also launched a new initiative: the ESRA Special Interest Groups (SIGs). These are groups of researchers with a shared interest in a topic relating to ESRA’s scope. The SIGs commit to exchange information and collaborate on their topic of interest. ESRA encourages the formation of new SIGs and existing groups can also apply to become ESRA SIGs. The benefits are that these groups will be listed on the ESRA website, have an opportunity to propose SIG sessions at ESRA conferences, can share SIG output on the ESRA website/social media, can advertise SIG membership and meetings on the ESRA website/social media, and can propose SIG events (e.g., in-person meetings at ESRA conferences with inclusion in the conference programme). ESRA is active on social media: Bluesky, and since recently, LinkedIn. The ESRA presence on X will be discontinued after the conference
    Bye-law 6 on the Duration of ESRA membership has been amended:
    The following bye-law, approved by the ESRA Committee on 1st December 2023, relates to the duration of the ESRA membership:
    1. ESRA memberships are for two calendar years. Membership expires on December 31st of the year following the start of the membership or renewal.
    2. Membership would terminate if any sum due from the member to ESRA is not paid in full within six months of it falling due.
  3. Report of the Treasurer (Pablo Cabrera Alvarez)
    The Vice Treasurer, Pablo Cabrera Alvarez, provided an overview of ESRA’s income and expenditure, after having expressed his gratitude to Emily Gilbert for her service as ESRA Treasurer over the past 6 years. ESRA is registered in the UK as a charity. ESRA’s two main sources of income are membership fees and the bi-annual conference. ESRA has a number of costs related to the conference and other educational activities, such as the new ESRA Summer School, the Survey Research Methods journal, as well as administrative, banking, and IT costs. In 2024, ESRA had a balance of £265,773. ESRA’s profits follow a two-year cycle, due to the bi-annual conference accounting for the vast majority of ESRA’s income, which covers the charity’s annual running costs also for the non-conference year. Covid-19 clearly had an impact on ESRA balances, as the face-to-face conference was cancelled. However, the online conference in 2021, whilst not making a large profit, limited the impact on reserves. ESRA’s financial statements are published on the ESRA website (Annual Reports). In 2025, so far, ESRA is set to make a profit; however, several costs related to the ESRA 2025 have not been paid yet. ESRA is also expanding in several new endeavours. ESRA are committed to ensuring the Survey Research Methods journal remains properly funded, including by funding the outsourcing of typesetting to a professional company. Discussions are ongoing within the Board around increasing sponsorship of other survey methods summer schools and events. Following a successful ESRA Summer School in 2024, discussions continue about similar future events.
  4. Report of the Journal Survey Research Methods (Ulrich Kohler)
    The Editor of Survey Research Methods, Ulrich Kohler, provided updates about the journal. Survey Research Methods is ESRA’s Peer Reviewed Open Access Journal. It is indexed by the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and Scopus. It is published at no expenses for readers nor authors (“free of costs”), and it is financed by ESRA. The journal is published open access under the licence CC-BY (“freedom of speech”). It publishes three issues per year, with six papers per issues, and occasionally hosts special issues. The journal is hosted in the server of the University of Konstanz, at the following website: http://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/. The impact factor has recently returned to its typical level, declining from an unusually high peak in 2021, which appears to have been an outlier. The levels of citations remain quite stable. Submission and rejection rates are increasing, the latter is partly due to the limited number of issues published per year. Also, many manuscripts are desk rejected as totally off topic. In addition to the need for high-quality submissions, the journal also requires reliable reviewers—which are increasingly difficult to recruit—new Associate Editors and a new Editor. A previous call for an Editor was circulated, but no appointment was made at the time. Since then, the required skill set has been revised: for instance, knowledge of LaTeX is no longer necessary, as typesetting has been outsourced. Nominations for the associate editor and editor positions are welcome (please contact ulrich.kohler@uni-potsdam.de). Ulrich Kohler is willing to continue serving in the role until a successor is identified.
    In terms of novelties, from 2025 it was decided to include eight papers rather than six per issue, to overcome the current backlog. Also, a system was developed to automate the upload of HTML (and CSS is under development). The special issue Survey Climate and Trust in Scientific Surveys (edited by Henning Silber, Bettina Langfeldt, Bella Struminskaya and Michael Traugott) is in print, and the special issue Learning through failures (edited by Lena Hipp and Sebastian Wenz) is under review. 
  5. Awards Ceremony
    The Chair of the Awards Sub-Committee, Stephanie Steinmetz, chaired the awards ceremony.
  6. Early Career Award
    The Early Career Award is assigned to the best paper to be presented during the conference by a junior scholar. Eight submissions were received and evaluated by an international commission composed of Henning Silber (University of Michigan, USA), Michael Graetz (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Marieke Heers (FORS, Switzerland), Oliver Lipps (FORS, Switzerland), Verena Ortmanns (German Institute for Adult Education, Bonn), and Stephanie Steinmetz (University of Lausanne, Switzerland). The award is assigned to the early career scholar Leah Bloy (with co-authors Yehezkel Resheff, Avraham N. Kluger, and Nechumi Malovicki-Yaffe) for the paper ‘Identifying Careless Survey Respondents through Machine Learning and Response Patterns’.  The prize is €500 and is sponsored by FORS.
    • Best Paper Award
      The Best Paper Award is offered to authors of the highest quality publications in the journal Survey Research Methods between 2023-2025. In total, 6 papers were pre-selected, on the basis of their originality, relevance and rigor. They were evaluated by a selection of ESRA Board Members (Tom Smith, Angelo Moretti, Pablo Cabrera Alvarez, Daniil Lebedev, Mengyao Hu, and Stephanie Steinmetz). The award is assigned to Maaike Walraad, Jonas Klingwort and Joep Burger for their paper: ‘Incorporating Machine Learning in Capture-Recapture Estimation of Survey Measurement Error’, which appeared in Survey Research Methods (2024), Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 99-112.
    • Outstanding Service Award
      The Outstanding Service Award acknowledges sustained and high-level contributions to European survey research, either of a methodological, substantive or infrastructural nature. Nominations are accepted via an open call to all ESRA members. Four nominations were received and voted by all members of the ESRA Board. The winner of the award is Professor Natalie Shlomo, from the School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester (UK).
    • Travel & Stay Grants
      Travel & Stay Grants are offered to postgraduate students and early career researchers in need of financial support; the grant is worth €500 for travel and stay expenses plus basic registration fee. Out of 49 applicants, 15 were selected to receive the grant: Andrea Ivanovska, Elena Sestini, Fernanda Alvarado-Leiton, Joshua Claassen, Kata Számel, Leah Bloy, Lisa Braito, Sergio D. Martinez-Martinez, Almut Schumann, Mingmeng Geng, Xinyi Chen, Wai Tak Tung, Joel Ardiaca, Çağla E. Yildiz, and Margherita Pellegrino.
  7. Presentation of the ESRA Board 2025-2027 & Farewell
    In line with the Constitution and the by-laws, within 20 weeks of the General Assembly a call for nominations was issued (and it remained open for 6 weeks). Given there was not a sufficient number of candidates to allow voters to choose between them, members were asked to vote to approve the appointment of the nominated persons. The remote vote was carried out using the Qualtrics platform. ESRA members were invited to approve new members entering the board, confirm appointments to named offices, and members eligible for re-election after the completion of 6 years of service. 
    • Four members reach their end of term or are standing down:
      • Vera Toepoel,
      • Emily Gilbert,
      • René Bautista, and
      • Trent Buskirk.
    • Six new members were put to the vote:
      • Ruxandra Comănaru,
      • Niccolò Ghirelli,
      • Mousumi Sarkar,
      • Jonas Klingwort,
      • Martha McRoy, and
      • Sharan Sharma.
    • Two members reach their end of term and apply for re-election:
      • Vera Lomazzi and
      • Stephanie Steinmetz.
    • Candidates for the roles of President, Vice President, Conference Chair, Vice Conference Chair, Treasurer and General Secretary were also put to the vote:
      • Daniel Seddig for President,
      • Alexander Wenz for Vice President,
      • Angelo Moretti for Conference Chair,
      • Eva Aizpurua (new member) for Vice Conference Chair,
      • Pablo Cabrera Alvarez for Treasurer, and
      • Alessandra Gaia for General Secreatry.

The quorum was reached, and the outcome of the election was as follows: 93% of voting members were in favour of the board, 3% were against, and 4% abstained.

The board is elected.

  1. Any Other Business
    There being no further business to discuss, the meeting was concluded.