Round 9 Rotating Modules announced

Questions on the timing of life as well as justice and fairness will be included in Round 9 (2018) of the European Social Survey (ESS), alongside the usual core module of questions.

The Timing of Life module will be a repeat of some of the questions asked during the Round 3 survey in 2006 in which interviewees were asked about significant events in their life and attitudes towards key life milestones and related moral views.

A successful application to repeat the module was led by Principal Applicant, Professor Francesco Billari, of the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford and Nuffield College.

A new module will look at justice and fairness in the context of respondents’ income to help establish how Europe copes with growing inequality.

The Round 9 Justice and Fairness module will be included for the first time following an application led by Professor Stefan Liebig of the Department of Sociology at Bielefeld University in Germany.

In each round of the ESS, teams of researchers are selected to contribute to the design of two rotating modules for the questionnaire.

Rotating modules are selected following an open competition amongst European researchers.

The announcement of the chosen rotating modules for Round 9 was made at the 3rd International ESS Conference held in Lausanne, Switzerland, last week (13-15 July) and the modules were selected by the ESS Scientific Advisory Board.

Recent topics covered in rotating modules include: welfare attitudes and energy and climate change (Round 8, 2016); immigration and health inequalities (Round 7, 2014); as well as democracy and personal and social well-being (Round 6, 2012).

The next call for applying to design a rotating module for ESS Round 10 (2020) is expected to be announced in autumn 2017.