DATABASE DESCRIPTION

The European Social Survey (ESS), the database we will be working on, was founded in 1995 by Sir Roger Jowell and Max Kaase from the European Science Foundation. Since then, 9 rounds of data collecting have been performed, the last round from 2018.

ESS explores different topics with variable frequency. Media and social trust, politics, subjective well-being, gender, household, sociodemographics and human values are topics covered in every round, however, in each round different topics have been added. For example, in round 6, from 2012, apart from the usual ones, democracy and personal well-being have been explored and that is the dataset we will be working on.

The data is collected via face-to-face interviews with participants. As 27 countries are taking part in this project, translation problems occur. Therefore, investigators use computational linguistics to minimize errors resulting from translations.

The sample for the survey is selected separately from each country. For bigger countries (over 2 million habitants) it is 1500 participants and for smaller — 800. For the sample, every citizen aged 15 and over can be selected. The person who was selected cannot be replaced. If he or she must not take part in research, their place is left empty.

For the technical details of the dataset, we will be working on: ESS Round 6 dataset contains 54.673 data points with 621 dimensions. 8 of 621 dimensions are categorical and 613 of 621 dimensions are numerical. In the survey, participants are asked to answer most of the questions on a 10-point scale.