PUBLIC TALK: Overcoming the challenges of making high quality cross-national comparisons. The example of the European Social Survey

A public lecture by Professor Rory Fitzgerald, Director, European Social Survey, City, University of London and UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

In this public lecture Professor Rory Fitzgerald will first outline the challenges of cross-national measurement using social surveys and outline how the European Social Survey (ESS) has tried to address them. These include issues related to sampling, questionnaire design, translation, fieldwork and data processing amongst others.

He will then use his own research to show how combining multiple waves of the ESS allowed an examination of the attitudes of migrants moving from Eastern to western Europe in their attitudes towards homosexuality. Do migrant attitudes change if they move from one context to another?

In the final part of the lecture Professor Fitzgerald will give some examples of how the ESS has been used both in academia and beyond and will make the case for developing an Australian sister survey to the ESS.