ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

The European social model, together with the ‘Human Rights Economy’ (OHCHR, 2023), places the principles of equality and non-discrimination at its core. Socio-demographic changes, structural inequalities and emerging social issues, including housing challenges and online violence, require responsive social data to meet current and future needs of society. This is particularly important at the moment when the EU is putting in place new equality strategies and integrating equality across broader social policies like the EU’s first anti-poverty strategy.
Inclusive and disaggregated data is essential to capture underrepresented groups and intersectional inequalities. However, people in vulnerable situations, and in particular those who are most marginalised such as Roma, are often the least likely to be adequately captured in official data. This may result from combination of factors, including definitional issues, small sample sizes, incomplete or missing sampling frames, and reluctance to participate in surveys. Some groups may formally be included in official statistics but remain invisible because surveys do not contain self-identification questions (e.g. gender minorities); other may be absent because outside standard population ‘lists’ (e.g. homeless people).
This session will focus on concrete examples of inclusive data practices in the field of social statistics, with particular attention to underrepresented groups. Key issues are:
• the main strategies adopted by National Statistical Institutes and other statistical providers to include hard-to-reach and minority populations in surveys (e.g. integrated sampling schemes, harmonisation of indicators across surveys);
• the conceptual and representational challenges that arise when surveying underrepresented populations;
• the performance and use of key socio-economic and equality-related indicators, such as poverty, discrimination and unemployment, across groups at risk;
• inequality data relating to processes and dynamics to trace how structural inequalities contribute to unequal outcomes in different domains and are transmitted across generations.