A new €9.75m project funded by the European Commission will bring together outputs from key social science research infrastructures to inform the NextGenerationEU recovery plan and European Union youth policy. Infra4NextGen will re-purpose and customise existing research services to support the five themes of the NextGenerationEU programme. CESSDA partners play some of the key roles in the project!

The project will be co-ordinated by the European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ESS ERIC) and includes CESSDA ERIC, the European Values Survey (EVS) and the Gender and Generations Programme (GGP) at its core.

NextGenerationEU

NextGenerationEU aims for Europe ‘to build a greener, more digital and more resilient future’ with a focus on five key areas: Make it Green; Make it Digital; Make it Healthy; Make it Strong; and Make it Equal.

In each of the five areas, partners will initially produce an inventory of relevant items already fielded on cross-national surveys, including Eurobarometer, European Quality of Life Survey, the European Social Survey (ESS), GGP, the EVS, and the International Social Survey Project (ISSP).

Important Social Sciences partners joining

The inventory will be compiled by City, University of London (ESS ERIC); the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), for the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS); and University of Milan (for the European Values Study).

Harmonised and merged extracts from existing datasets that reduce the burden on analysts and increase sample sizes will be produced by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (representing CESSDA ERIC).

Existing data from these surveys will then by analysed and summarised to produce a series of policy-relevant tabulations and visualisations with commentary presented in a dedicated online portal.

This initial analysis will be supplemented with new data collected on each topic later in the project via the online CRONOS web panel fielded over five waves in 11 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom).

Post-collection weighting of the panel data will be undertaken by Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex (representing ESS ERIC).

New data on each NextGenEU theme will be collected and made rapidly available through the established CROss-National Online Survey (CRONOS) Panel. This panel will be administered by  Centerdata.

Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (representing ESS ERIC) will ensure that the CRONOS data is processed and easily accessible by the research community through a dedicated Data Portal with all data organised by NextGenerationEU theme.

Data collection via the CRONOS 3 panel will be conducted by beneficiaries in 11 countries: Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, IHS; Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, ICS-UL; Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences; KU Leuven; National Centre for Social Research; Sciences Po; Social Science Research Center, MTA TK; Umeå University; University of Ljubljana; University of Iceland; and University of Turku.

The work on compiling existing and collecting new data will also be undertaken by Cardiff University (Make it Green); Bielefeld University (Make it Digital); NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Make it Healthy); Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Make it Strong); and TÁRKI Social Research Institute and University of Exeter (Make it Equal).

King’s College London (UK) will use evidence from the partners working on each area to plan and schedule deliberative workshops with young people (aged 18-34) in four countries.

An educational tool (E-NextGen) allowing data to be used in classrooms and by the general public will be implemented by European Association of Geographers EUROGEO; and Tilburg University representing the European Values survey.

The tool will include interactive maps, infographics, blog posts, short research notes and the ability for users to position themselves on the five themes.

CESSDA´s role

Comprehensive training materials related to all project outputs and NextGenerationEU areas will be generated by CESSDA ERIC; City, University of London (ESS ERIC); GESIS (CESSDA ERIC), KNAW; ADP – Slovenian Social Science Data Archives at the University of Ljubljana (CESSDA ERIC); University of Milan; AUSSDA – The Austrian Social Science Data Archive with contributions from University of Vienna (CESSDA ERIC) and University of Innsbruck (CESSDA ERIC).

Focus for CESSDA in this project will be mainly on Training, where AUSSDA from Austria will be Leading the Training Work Package, and ADP from Slovenia will be leading one of the training tasks.

This will include online training, a series of 17 webinars, nine workshops, and a short video series with demonstrations, tutorials/guides and research discussions.

GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (representing CESSDA ERIC) will be responsible for leading on the work of providing the harmonised datasets from across the survey programmes. 

The commencement of the project is set for March 1, 2024 and it will last for four years. CESSDA eagerly anticipates becoming part of this exceptional consortium in this exciting new endeavor.