CESSDA: Committed to supporting research on COVID-19
CESSDA and its national Service Providers have embraced the many challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its significant societal and health-related impacts.
Take a deep dive into some of the major milestones to support researchers working on COVID-19 related research since the start of the pandemic.
Milestone 1: New data on COVID-19 in the CESSDA Data Catalogue
2020 marked a major milestone in the CESSDA multilingual social sciences thesaurus with the inclusion of ‘COVID’ and ‘contagious diseases’ and new entries in the CESSDA Data Catalogue, where researchers can find and reuse data from research in the social sciences and humanities from 13 service providers. Countries span Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
A key challenge is understanding each other’s metadata standards and capturing essential information that is usable across disciplines, including behavioural data for research available across the social sciences. The Data Catalogue contains metadata of surveys in the holdings of the service providers. All COVID-19-related metadata is harvested to the Data Catalogue as they become available. The CESSDA dedicated COVID-19 web page is a good place for researchers to kick-start their work.
Milestone 2: Podcast on multi-faceted approaches to COVID-19
Cross-disciplinary research is the focus of the CESSDA podcast with Prof. Sylvia Kritzinger, one of the principal investigators of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP). The podcast underscores the fundamental importance of tracking the multi-faceted societal and economic impacts of the coronavirus and the wider benefits of sharing data, including policy recommendations, raising awareness among citizens and enabling students to re-use the data for their own research.
The podcast shows the added value of repositories like the CESSDA Data Catalogue and the intersection between the social sciences and many other disciplines in tackling the grand challenges of our time. Find out more.
Milestone 3: Booklet: “CESSDA behavioural data for research tackling the global COVID-19 challenge”
Another milestone is the booklet on behavioural data related to COVID-19, with highlights from the European Social Science Data Archives, COVID-19 insights, the CESSDA Data Catalogue and much more. Created for the CESSDA virtual expo stand at the 2021 edition of the International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI 2021), the booklet brings together key insights from 2020-2021. Tracking the evolution of COVID-19 through the Data Catalogue enables comparative studies, can influence policy-making and build public trust. Most importantly, good data can save lives as a testimony to how the CESSDA milestones on COVID-19 are bringing real insights with high societal impacts. Access the booklet.
COVID-19 is one of the research challenges spotlighted in the upcoming CESSDA™ Roadshow Series starting on 30 September and running through October 2021.
A news item by Trust-IT