What the site is
European Social Research Notes is an information guide to European social research. It explains projects, publications and events and points readers to the pages that cover them.
The site is not a research institute. It takes no bookings, gives no quotes and dispatches nothing. It only describes and indexes material.
Research themes
- SPA: analysis of social policy, with a focus on integration and social structure
- STARS: how technology and research relate to society
- EASY: sustainability and the environment
- TEA: evaluating transport policy
A fifth, overview theme gathers conclusions from the other four:
Why comparative research matters
Cross-disciplinary comparative research sets the same question against several countries and several fields at once. A housing, ageing or transport question looks different in an economist's data, a sociologist's interviews and a policy analyst's review, and putting them side by side shows what is local and what is shared. Comparison across borders also tests whether a result from one country holds elsewhere, which matters for policy that is meant to work across Europe.