COMPSOC: exploiting, documenting, and enriching COMParative data from large-scale surveys in the SOCial sciences

The applicants are responsible for four unique ongoing large scale survey projects: European Values Study (from 1981 onwards)), the (Inter)National Election Studies (from 1971), Social and Cultural Developments in the Netherlands (from 1979), and Family Surveys Dutch Population (from 1992). These major trend data contain an enormous amount of cross-temporal and cross-national information on social and political values, attitudes, and behavior. The overlapping and complementary data and variables of these studies play a central role in many contemporary social and political science theories and are essential for our understanding of developments in modern society. Within each of these projects a lot of efforts has gone into making the data accessible and useful for social scientists within and outside the existing research groups. However, given limited resources these efforts have not led to results that are up to modern standards of data access and archiving. The three research groups have now joined forces in the COMPSOC project to take these data bases to the next level (i) by making them much better accessible for other researchers in a uniform manner and (ii) by enriching them adding theoretically important common elements in an efficient and comparable way. In this way, present and future researchers will have more easy access to the data that are moreover better documented and combine individual and aggregate (contextual) level analyses for answering new, important research questions.