ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Children and adolescents are among the most challenging populations to survey. Yet the demand for high-quality data on their health, well-being and living conditions continues to grow. Surveying this group raises questions at every stage of the survey lifecycle, from consent and data protection involving parents and legal guardians to the use of the parent–child dyad as the unit of observation and the development of age-appropriate instruments that span a wide developmental range. Other issues include the trade-off between proxy and self-reports and the difficulty of maintaining participation across childhood and adolescence. Each of these decisions has consequences for coverage, measurement and non-response error.
This session brings together researchers who are currently planning, piloting or conducting studies with children and adolescents, and invites contributions examining survey methodology and practice in this field. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- innovative study designs and sampling strategies, including population register-based recruitment and longitudinal or panel designs;
- mixed-mode data collection (web, paper, app) and mode effects across age groups;
- incentive schemes for young respondents and their households, including what works, for whom and at what cost;
- survey frequency, respondent burden, panel conditioning and attrition over the transition from childhood to adulthood;
- age-differentiated questionnaires, cognitive pretesting with minors and the shift from proxy to self-report;
- responsive and adaptive fieldwork designs, paradata-based quality monitoring and non-response adjustment for young target groups;
- AI-assisted methods in this context: LLM-supported instrument development and interviews;
- ethical and legal frameworks, consent procedures and safeguarding;
We particularly encourage empirical evidence from pilots, experiments and methodological evaluations, as well as design decisions from studies still under development. The aim is to identify shared standards and open questions for child and adolescent studies.