The central aim of the ESS is to develop and conduct a systematic study of changing values, attitudes, attributes and behaviour patterns within European polities. Academically driven but designed to feed into key European policy debates, the ESS hopes to measure and explain how people's social values, cultural norms and behaviour patterns are distributed, the way in which they differ within and between nations, and the direction and speed at which they are changing.

The survey contains a core that will be replicated every two years (first round of data collected 2002/2003) plus rotating thematic modules, allocated to teams of scholars on a competitive basis.

The European Commission, the European Science Foundation and scientific funding bodies in each participating country fund the ESS jointly. To take part, countries must find the funding to cover the costs of fieldwork and co-ordination of the survey at the national level.

The project is directed by a Central Coordinating Team led by Roger Jowell at the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, City University.

The European Social Survey Education Net

To facilitate and enrich access to and usage of survey data, the ESS-project was granted seed funding to create an Internet-based analysis-training programme. This led to the development of the ESS EduNet.

ESS EduNet is designed to meet the many requests we have had to make it easier and more efficient for lecturers to use ESS data in their teaching. Instructions and hands-on examples make it managable even for inexperienced users to independently browse through and utilise ESS data.

The pedagogical idea is to create an interactive learning environment that combines the elements of social science to an integrated whole: theory, data and methodology. Typically, a topic contains some theoretical background on an imporatant social science problem. This presentation is illustrated by results found by analysing the ESS data. Each topic also contains exercises to be solved either online or after data has been downloaded. Detailed instructions, both regarding which buttons to push and regarding the interpretation of the results, are prepared for each exercise.

In our view, ESS EduNet has three important advantages:

• Closeness to data. Data and theory are interwoven. Inside ESS EduNet, data is never more than a few mouseclicks away. This closeness to data stimulates creativity: "How is the situation in this country compared to that country...?", "What if we choose another variable...?".
• Easy to use. The instructions, the examples and the software for online statistical analysis make it very easy to perform statistical analyses. This easyness is important in the process of demystifying statistical data analysis for users with phobia for numbers.
• Research practise. ESS EduNet could be described as a social science research simulator. In safe suroundings the users get important practise in the different steps in social research: use theory to generate hypothesises, manipulate data, analyse data and interpret results.

ESS EduNet is developed at Norwegian Social Science Data Services.