The European Social Survey (ESS ERIC) has been awarded €3.2m by the European Commission to consolidate, modernise and future-proof its research infrastructure.
The work will include the introduction of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and efforts to expand its membership amongst European Union (EU) member and candidate countries.
ESS-Innovate – part of the European Commission’s Horizon Europe funding programme – is a two-and-a-half-year project due to begin on 1 June 2026.
Led by ESS ERIC, the project will enhance the sustainability of the ESS infrastructure to fully realise the benefit of its recent transition in modes of data collection.
The project will also see three national teams – Germany, the Netherlands and Serbia – join the self-completion panel survey operated by the ESS (CRONOS) for the first time.
Professor Rory Fitzgerald, Director of the ESS ERIC and Coordinator of ESS-Innovate, said:
“We are very excited to deliver this Horizon Europe project to strengthen our data collection mode transition and ensure that the ESS remains the gold standard for comparative survey research, providing the data Europe needs to tackle its most pressing challenges.”
“ESS-Innovate will enable the integration of new technologies to support our national teams in implementing the survey, including new in-house AI tools to support them with their tasks.”
“We will focus on increasing our existing levels of participation by encouraging EU member and candidate countries to join our survey, and add three new ESS countries to our self-completion panel survey (CRONOS).”
AI-assisted coding of occupation data
A team led by Kamil Filipek at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Computational Modelling, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) in Poland, will develop a multilingual AI system to automate the classification of respondents’ occupations.
Coding will continue to be aligned with the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08) but is expected to reduce errors and save thousands of hours of manual coding.
The new AI system will be fully tested by ESS national teams before its integration into future rounds and published as open-source software to allow for adoption by other researchers and projects.
This tool will be developed using in-house technology to avoid relying on private AI and technology companies, to be fully GDPR-compliant and ensure the ESS ERIC’s academic independence.
Self-completion tools
In Round 13 (2026/27) of the ESS, survey data will be collected using only self-completion methods, and panel survey data continues to be collected via a self-completion panel survey (CRONOS).
Tools to support self-completion data collection developed by Centerdata will be enhanced during ESS-Innovate to improve real-time monitoring and support fieldworker efforts to encourage potential respondents to participate.
In addition, ESS questionnaires and contact materials will be reviewed to maximise their accessibility, focusing on low literacy respondents, who are the most affected by the switch from face-to-face to self-completion fieldwork.
This review will be supported primarily through qualitative research in the UK (led by Tim Hanson at ESS HQ) and Poland (led by Michal Kotnarowski at IFIS PAN), including in-depth interviews with organisations that provide support and advocacy for low-literacy groups.
MyESS
Led by ESS Deputy Director, Diana Zavala-Rojas, a team at Universitat Pompeu Fabra will further develop myESS – the portal used by ESS central and national teams to administer each round of the survey.
Enhancements to myESS will be undertaken to provide a better overview of survey operations and improve the data production lifecycle, using an AI/language model to track the completion of tasks.
Self-completion panel survey (CRONOS)
Two waves of the self-completion panel survey operated by the ESS (CRONOS) will be fielded in three countries – Germany, the Netherlands and Serbia – for the first time.
National teams led by Oshrat Hochman (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany), Vladimir Mentus (Institute of Social Sciences, Serbia), and Tim Reeskens (Tilburg University, Netherlands) will recruit respondents to the panel using Round 12 of the ESS.
They will then be trained on the use of CRONOS tools developed by Centerdata and ESS HQ for administering the panel survey, and work with GESIS on the translation of survey questions.
Sikt – Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research will publish the new panel data in the second half of the project alongside weights produced by the University of Essex.
Membership development
The ESS currently has the highest number of members (30) of all 32 European Research Infrastructure Consortiums (ERICs) but does not have full coverage of the EU.
ESS-Innovate will help ESS to address this gap with new membership development activities led by ambassadors aimed at EU member states not currently involved in the ESS, and EU candidate countries.
Helvetas in Switzerland will lead on the creation of national coordination teams to support funding applications, organise events, and create promotional campaigns in target countries.
A major ESS conference – Europe past, present and future: the ESS addressing key citizen challenges – will be held in Brussels, Belgium, in 2028.
The main aim of the conference is to strengthen the visibility and use of ESS data and resources among EU policymakers and stakeholders.
The results of a new impact study commissioned via ESS-Innovate will be presented at the conference and will provide evidence of impact to support other membership development activities.
Participants
The project involves six ESS Core Scientific Team (CST) members: ESS ERIC HQ,at City St George’s, University of London (UK); Centerdata (Netherlands); GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany); Sikt – Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (Norway); Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain); and University of Essex (UK).
There are also five beneficiaries taking part in ESS-Innovate: Helvetas – Swiss development organization (Switzerland); Institute of Social Sciences (Serbia); Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (Poland); Polish Academy of Sciences (IFIS PAN, Poland); and Tilburg University (Netherlands).
The Coordinator of ESS-Innovate is ESS ERIC Director, Professor Rory Fitzgerald, and the main point of contact for the project is Niccolò Ghirelli (Deputy Coordinator).