An Excel sheet containing event data from ESS rounds 1 to 5 has been released in the Monitoring National Context section (Methodology).

The design weight for France in ESS round 1 has erroneously been set to 1 for all respondents. A new file containing the corrected variable DWEIGHT for France has been made available from the ESS1 Data download section.

For ESS rounds 1 to 4 there has been an upgrade of the harmonised variables for highest level of education.

As of 02.02.2011, the former 7 category EDULVL variables for respondent, partner, father and mother have been replaced by a 5 category EDULVLA variables.

In addition, depending on the availability and level of detail of country specific education variables, new 7 category harmonised education variables EISCED have been produced.

All rounds of the ESS have been updated in a major upgrade of the ESS Data website 02.02.11. Note that edition 4.0 of data and documentation of the new ESS4 data release also includes two new countries, Ireland and Lithuania, taking the total number of countries in the ESS4 data release to 30.

The ESS Data website has been upgraded with a cumulative data file for the first four rounds of the ESS. The cumulative data are available from a new tool, the ESS Cumulative Data Wizard, where users can customise their own subsets of data in different formats.

The ESS Data and Documentation section has been updated with a cumulative data file for the first eight rounds of the ESS. The cumulative data are available from the ESS Cumulative Data Wizard, where users can customise their own subsets of data in different formats. The ESS Cumulative Data Wizard gives access to cumulative data from countries that have been included in the integrated ESS files in two or more rounds. All variables that have been asked in more than one round are included in the cumulative data file.

The ESS Data web site has been upgraded with the cumulative file for the first three rounds of the ESS. The file contains data from countries that have fielded at least two of the first three ESS rounds.

The ESS Data web site has been upgraded with new editions of the integrated files ESS1-2002 edition 6.1, ESS2-2004 edition 3.1 and ESS3-2006 edition 3.2. For further information, please se Version notes for ESS1, ESS2 and ESS3 respectively.

Sample design data files (SDDF) are available in SPSS format, along with a PDF file describing the structure and use of the SDDFs. The files are available from the ESS1 - 2002 Data download section for the following countries: Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg and Slovenia.

The religion variables C10 (RLGDNM) and C12 (RLGDNME) contain some coding errors. Category 8, "other non-Christian religions" is included in category 4 "other Christian denominations". In subsequent releases of the ESS1 data, these variables will be removed from the integrated international data file, renamed and included in the country-specific data file for France.