ESRA 2027 sessions by theme
Back to Overview of Sessions
Disciplinary Needs – Interdisciplinary Solutions? Research Infrastructures in a Changing Social Science Landscape |
| Coordinator 1 | Dr Dimitri Prandner (Johannes Kepler University of Linz) |
| Coordinator 2 | Professor Johannes Breuer (University of Duisburg-Essen) |
| Coordinator 3 | Dr Silke Fürst (University of Zurich in Switzerland) |
| Coordinator 4 | Dr Christian Strippel (Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin) |
| Coordinator 5 | Professor Christian Schwarzenegger (University of Bremen) |
| Coordinator 6 | Dr Erik Koenen (University of Bremen) |
Session Details
The growing availability and diversity of data are fundamentally changing empirical social research. Yet access to more data does not necessarily mean that these data can be meaningfully used, linked, documented, or reused. Research infrastructures, therefore, must support not only the generation, provision, and preservation of data, but also the disciplinary contexts that give these data meaning and enable their interpretation.
Building on recent developments and discussions in the field of communication and media research, this session aims to foster a broader debate about the infrastructures needed to support increasingly diverse research practices in empirical social research. Communication research provides an instructive case: traditional survey data increasingly coexist with digital trace and platform data, media content, computational data collections, research software, specialized databases, and archives. Similar developments and challenges can be observed across the social sciences. This session, therefore, asks what can be learned from discipline-specific infrastructure developments for survey research and other fields dealing with increasingly heterogeneous data. Making such resources FAIR and sustainably available requires infrastructures that reflect disciplinary research traditions, documentation practices, legal and ethical challenges, and specific needs for contextualizing data. Yet, discipline-specific resources need to connect to broader requirements and efforts in the social sciences.
We invite contributions examining what research infrastructures are needed to make heterogeneous research data genuinely usable for specific research communities. Contributions may address:
•discipline-specific infrastructure requirements
•data archives, repositories, registries, research software, and other community resources
•resources for integrating survey data with digital trace, administrative, media, or other emerging data sources
•documentation, harmonization, interoperability, FAIRness, and long-term preservation of different types of research data
•efforts in connecting disciplinary resources to national, European, and cross-disciplinary infrastructures
We welcome conceptual and empirical papers, comparative perspectives, and concrete infrastructure use cases, including work-in-progress or contributions addressing.
