European Social Survey 4th round

In 2001, the European Science Foundation initiated a European project called “European Social Survey – ESS” with the purpose of continuous monitoring of changes in the socio-political attitudes and value system of citizens of European countries. The survey is conducted every two years in order to gain the best possible insight into the course of the mentioned changes and to enable comparisons between European countries. An additional, no less important research goal is the development and improvement of cross-cultural research methods. The ESS is carried out in such a way that a representative sample of citizens is surveyed in each member country with the same questionnaire and precisely established methodology. Thanks to the financial support of the National Foundation for Science, Higher Education and Technological Development of the Republic of Croatia, Croatia joined the 4th round of the ESS in 2008, and the research was conducted in Croatia by a team of scientists from the Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences. The results of the conducted research, after a rigorous control of the data collected by the Norwegian Social Sciences Data Services, were published on March 24, 2010 on the ESS website http://ess.nsd.uib.no / and thus became available to the world public for various analyses. Data are currently available for 28 European countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Croatia, Israel, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Great Britain. Topics covered by this research include areas that are continuously monitored: trust in institutions, socio-political orientation; basic moral, political and social values; social inclusion and exclusion; quality of life, health, safety; educational and professional status; economic status; socio-demographic characteristics, and the specific topics of the 4th round of research were attitudes about different forms of social care and their availability, as well as the perception of different age groups and the experience of age discrimination.