Text: Kaisa Järvelä
European Social Survey: Finnish Data Now Openly Available for All Users
The European Social Survey (ESS) is a cross-national survey measuring attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns in more than 30 European countries. The ESS has been conducted every two years since 2002. The ESS is funded jointly by the European Commission, the European Science Foundation and academic funding bodies from each participating country. The Academy of Finland funds the project in Finland.
All Finnish data collected in 2014 for the ESS are now openly available and downloadable for all users in the Aila Data Service, maintained by the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.
The ESS questionnaires consist of a core module, which remains relatively constant from round to round, and two or three rotating modules, repeated at intervals. The core module monitors change in a wide range of social variables, including media and social trust, politics, subjective well-being, and values. The rotating modules have focused, over the years, on citizen involvement, health and care, economic morality, work-family balance, welfare attitudes, democracy, and justice.
In 2014, the rotating modules charted social determinants of health and health inequality as well as attitudes towards immigration. The questions in the latter module allows the study of public opinion in Finland towards immigration just before the European migrant crisis began, enabling interesting comparisons with surveys conducted during and, in the future, after the crisis.
