ESRA 2027 sessions by theme
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Opportunities and Challenges of Continuous Cross-National Surveys - insights from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) |
| Coordinator 1 | Professor Stephanie Steinmetz (University of Lausanne) |
| Coordinator 2 | Professor Eglė Butkevičienė (Kaunas University of Technology) |
| Coordinator 3 | Dr René Bautista (NORC at the University of Chicago) |
| Coordinator 4 | Dr Ricardo Ignacio Gonzalez Toro (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez) |
| Coordinator 5 | Professor Ioannis Andreadis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) |
Session Details
How can cross-national surveys maintain comparability over time while responding to changing societies, new research priorities, and transformations in survey research? Long-running international survey programmes must continuously balance continuity and innovation: preserving measures needed to study social change while adapting questionnaires, sampling and fieldwork practices, and data collection modes to new contexts and methodological developments.
The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), which has fielded annual surveys since 1985, provides an important setting for examining these questions. Its long time series, broad cross-national coverage, and decentralized structure make it possible to reflect on methodological lessons from developing and implementing survey modules across diverse national contexts over several decades. The programme faces many of the central methodological issues confronting comparative survey research today, including maintaining cross-national and longitudinal comparability, questionnaire development and translation, measurement equivalence, changing data collection practices, declining response rates, and differences in national survey infrastructures.
This session brings together survey practitioners, data providers, and researchers to examine what can be learned from the ISSP experience for the broader field of cross-national survey research and how long-running cross-national surveys can remain both comparable and responsive to social and methodological change. We particularly welcome contributions addressing the development and implementation of ISSP modules; questionnaire design, translation, and measurement; sampling, fieldwork, and data quality; cross-national and longitudinal comparability; and the methodological consequences of innovation and change in long-running surveys. Contributions may examine both established and emerging methodological challenges and draw lessons relevant beyond the ISSP itself. Substantive papers using ISSP data are also welcome, particularly where they demonstrate the analytical value of ISSPs long-running and comparative design.
