Landmark agreement between ESS and European Values Study

Last week, the European Social Survey (ESS) and the European Values Study (EVS) formally signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

The latest MoU was signed during the 5th International ESS Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, by Professor Rory Fitzgerald, ESS Director, and Professor Ruud Luijkx, EVS Executive Committee Chair.

The four-year agreement signifies closer working between the two organisations to share knowledge, expertise and survey methodology.

It has been agreed that questions on the collectivist and individualist values proposed by EVS will be fielded as a rotating module in a future round of the ESS.

Work on developing a suitable module of questions previously fielded in the EVS began during the SUSTAIN-2 project and has been approved in principle by the ESS Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

The two surveys will exchange knowledge around substantive research on measuring similar concepts and common topics, while using questions specific to each survey.

The ESS and EVS will seek to encourage networking between European infrastructures with the aim to encourage close collaboration between them. 

This will include the organisation of at least one annual meeting with representatives of these infrastructures, in order to facilitate knowledge sharing and discussions about the state of affairs in European social survey research.

The two organisations previously came together as partners in several Horizon 2020 projects including Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS) and SUSTAIN-2.

Both are also part of our new Horizon Europe project, Infra4NextGen, which will re-purpose and customise existing research services to support the five themes of the NextGenerationEU programme: Make it Green; Make it Digital; Make it Healthy; Make it Strong; and Make it Equal.

The European Values Study is a large-scale, cross-national, repeated cross-sectional survey measuring the basic human values of respondents. 

The first round of the EVS was undertaken in 1981 with fieldwork conducted every nine years - most recently in 2017.

The EVS has an MoU with the World Values Survey (WVS) about close cooperation, which means that the data collected in Europe for WVS will be carried out following EVS methodological guidelines to make possible worldwide comparisons, facilitated by an integrated dataset.

This latest agreement is the seventh MoU the ESS now has in place with survey projects across the world, including the East Asian Social Survey Research Network (EASS) and General Social Survey (United States).

Professor Rory Fitzgerald, Director of the ESS, said: 

“We are absolutely delighted to sign this landmark agreement with the European Values Study.

“We have worked closely with colleagues at EVS over the past decade - from the SERISS H2020 project to the Horizon Europe Infra4NextGen - and we are excited to formalise that relationship over the next four years.

“We hope that being able to field EVS questions in our survey will be beneficial to data users.” 

Professor Ruud Luijkx, Chair of the EVS Executive Committee, added:

“EVS as a European Research Infrastructure is thrilled to have a Memorandum of Understanding with the ESS. Our already close relationship will expand further in this way.

“Let the cooperation between ESS and EVS be a first step to a further  collaboration to create a European self-completion platform, also with the other European social surveys.”