ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Much of the evidence used to describe social and political change comes from survey research, including trends in political trust, democratic attitudes, social values, and inequalities. However, the methods used to measure these trends are changing. Declining response rates, evolving sampling strategies, shifts from interviewer-administered to self-completion and mixed modes, variations in questionnaire design, and growing dependence on harmonisation and statistical adjustment, as well as real changes in the meaning of concepts over time, make comparisons across populations and over time more challenging.

While apparent cross-national differences or temporal trends may reflect changes in public attitudes, they may also be affected by variations in sample composition, non-response, the method of data collection, the instruments used for measurement, response styles, weighting, or the combination of data from multiple survey programmes. The same problem arises whenever researchers seek to distinguish substantive population change from changes in survey design and implementation.

This session invites methodological and empirical studies that examine how representation, measurement, and survey design affect substantive inference. We particularly encourage studies that link methodological choices to substantive findings. We welcome contributions on non-response bias and representativeness; probability and non-probability sampling; response styles; weighting, calibration, and post-stratification; mode transitions and fieldwork effects; measurement comparability and invariance; survey harmonisation and integration; longitudinal and cross-national estimation; and internal or external indicators of survey.

Our broader aim is to shift the focus from evaluating individual components of survey quality to assessing whether survey evidence can be used to make credible, comparable and reproducible inferences about populations and social change.