ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Linking survey data with geospatial information has moved from a specialist undertaking to an established part of the empirical repertoire in the social sciences. Surveys increasingly provide geocoordinates or municipality identifiers for respondents’ residences, secure access infrastructures have been established, and regional indicators derived from administrative records, satellite imagery, social media, and other digital traces are available at finer spatial and temporal resolution. Curated geodata collections, software toolboxes, and documented workflows continue to lower the technical barriers to linkage.
The decisive questions have shifted accordingly from whether contextual information can be linked to survey responses to which context is substantively relevant for a given research question; at which spatial scale and with which temporal reference it should be measured; how measurement error, boundary changes, and residential mobility propagate into substantive estimates; how geo-data can be integrated into panel survey infrastructures and longitudinal applications; and what can credibly be inferred about contextual effects from observational survey data.
The session invites contributions addressing, among others:
– new sources of regional indicators, and procedures for retrieving and managing large spatial data from online sources;
– the harmonization of areal units and boundary changes in longitudinal analysis;
– data protection, secure access, and reproducibility in work with sensitive georeferenced data;
– the integration of spatial-analytical and causal-inferential techniques into cross-sectional and longitudinal survey analysis;
– substantive applications, for instance on spatial inequalities in health and the labor market, migration and refugee integration, residential and neighborhood preferences, or institutional trust.
We welcome methodological, infrastructural, and applied contributions, including work in progress and inconclusive findings, and explicitly encourage submissions from doctoral and early-career researchers. The session aims to connect the growing community of survey researchers working spatially across countries and disciplines.