European Social Survey

OVERVIEW 

The European Social Survey (ESS) is a cross-national research project that gathers data on social attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors across Europe. Established in 2001, it aims to track long-term trends in social and political values while ensuring high methodological standards. Conducted every two years, the survey covers topics such as democracy, immigration, well-being, and trust in institutions. The ESS provides freely accessible data to researchers, policymakers, and the public, helping to inform social policy and academic studies across Europe. 

*The description above is a paraphrased version of the description on ESS website. 

Available Data File Formats 

EXCEL, PNG, SVG, & PDF 

Accessibility 

This is an open data source for public use 

How to retrieve data by example; 

Scenario  

Assume you want information, from select European nations, the degree to which the population expresses “feeling depressed.”  

Step-by-step 

1. Visit ESS via: https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/ 

2. Move the mouse pointer to the top and click on “Data” in yellow.  

3. Scroll down the webpage and click on “Are you happy?” in red. 

4.  Select “Mental health” in red from the Theme (Filter) dropdown list. 

5.  From the Question/Variable dropdown list, click on “w4q47 – During the past week, how often have you felt depressed?” in red. 

6.  This is how the output would appear after making the appropriate selections. 

7.  Click on the download button in red to display a list of download format. Click on “Download XLSX” in yellow. 

8.  Afterwards, this is how the data would appear in Excel. 

Be sure to consult with the source website on how to correctly cite your data. For this scenario, the citation in APA would look something like this;   

European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2023) CRONOS2 Wave 4 edition 1.0 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/cron2w4e01.