Apologies for cross posting, may be of interest to some:
The first results of a project to support the European Union (EU) tackle socio-economic challenges across Europe are now available.
Synergies for Europe’s Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS) is a four-year project (2015-2019) funded as part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.
The project aims to strengthen and harmonise social science research across Europe by fostering collaboration and developing shared standards between the three leading European research infrastructures in the social sciences:
- European Social Survey (ESS ERIC)
- Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE ERIC)
- Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA AS)
and organisations representing:
- Generations and Gender Programme (GGP)
- European Values Study (EVS)
- WageIndicator Survey
The SERISS project is focussing on three key areas: addressing key challenges for cross-national data collection, breaking down barriers between social science infrastructures, and embracing the future of the social sciences.
The UK Data Service has authored a report that describes two methods that were used to assess the translation quality of the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST): back-translation and the comparison of terms used to index the same set of cross-national surveys using ELSST. Read more in our blog post ‘First results of SERISS project’.
Background to ELSST
ELSST is used for searching the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archive’s (CESSDA) data catalogue and facilitates access to research and data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary.
The thesaurus covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and increasingly, environmental science.
ELSST is available in 12 languages: Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish, with more planned, and is currently being developed as part of the ESRC-funded CESSDA-ELSST project.
Updates on the progress of the CESSDA-ELSST project are available via our ELSST blog.
