Context

Europe is a vast and diverse continent and it's population is a fascinating subject for sociological studies. The European Social Survey provides great data sets for exactly that purpose. According to their own description, "The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted across Europe since its establishment in 2001. Every two years, face-to-face interviews are conducted with newly selected, cross-sectional samples. The survey measures the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations in more than thirty nations.". This data set contains the results of the 8th round of the ESS surveyed in 2016/17.

Content

The CSV file contains all the data from the survey. Every row corresponds to an individual respondent and every column is a variable representing a response to a survey question from fields such as media and social trust, politics, subjective well-being, climate change, gender, human values, welfare, or administrative details and weights. For a detailed description of the variables, please refer to the accompanying PDF file or the ESS data website, where you can find all documentation as well as the data of the previous ESS rounds.
Be aware that some values (e.g. 66,77,88,99) are used to encode missing, refused, or invalid responses. Refer to the documentation for more details.

Acknowledgements

I greatly acknowledge the great effort of everyone participating in conducting this survey and thank the ESS for making the data available without restrictions, for not-for-profit purposes. For conditions of use, please refer to the ESS website.

Inspiration

How do the citizens of European countries think about certain social issues? What about climate change, politics, immigration, individual well-being? How do peoples opinions and believes differ within a country or among the countries?
Let's dive into this great data set and find out.

Citation

ESS Round 8: European Social Survey Round 8 Data (2016). Data file edition 2.1. NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data, Norway – Data Archive and distributor of ESS data for ESS ERIC. doi:10.21338/NSD-ESS8-2016.