A Short Introduction to the ISSP

The ISSP (International Social Survey Programme) is an ongoing annual programme of cross-national collaboration. The first survey was conducted in 1985 in six countries. 

1. A short view on history
2. Organisational aspects
3. Conducting the survey programme

1. A short view on history

The ISSP was initiated in late 1983 when SCPR, London, secured funds from the Nuffield Foundation to hold meetings to further international collaboration between four existing surveys - the General Social Survey (GSS), conducted by NORC in the USA, the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA), conducted by SCPR in Great Britain, the Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaften (ALLBUS), conducted by GESIS-ZUMA in West Germany and the National Social Science Survey (NSSS), conducted by ANU in Australia. Prior to this, NORC and GESIS-ZUMA had been collaborating bilaterally since 1982 on a common set of questions.

The four founding members agreed to

1. jointly develop modules dealing with important areas of social science
2. field the modules as a fifteen-minute supplement to the regular national surveys (or a special survey if necessary)
3. include an extensive common core of background variables
4. make the data available to the social science community as soon as possible.

Each research organisation funds all of its own costs. There are no central funds. The merging of the data into a cross-national data set is performed by the GESIS-ZA (formerly Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung at the University of Cologne (ZA)). Since 1997 the ZA is supported in this task by the Spanish ISSP partner ASEP, Madrid.

2. Organisational aspects

The ISSP secretariat is currently located at the NSD (Norwegian Social Science Data Services), Bergen, Norway. Bjorn Henrichsen, Director, Knut Kalgraff Skjåk, Assistant Director. The Secretariat co-ordinates official activities within the ISSP like membership applications, organising the annual meetings, administering the working principles and the list of publications related to ISSP research etc. The contact is: issp@nsd.uib.no

GESIS-ZUMA is the German member of the ISSP. As a founding member of the ISSP, GESIS-ZUMA has fielded all the German ISSP modules. It is responsible for the development, implementation and methods documentation of the German modules and participates in the drafting of ISSP source modules. GESIS-ZUMA is the convenor of the ISSP methodology research groups.

The ZA is the official archive of the ISSP since 1986. The GESIS-ZA is responsible for processing, merging and archiving all national and cross-national data sets and for distributing data and documentation (including codebooks) of merged ISSP data sets to the scientific community. It is now supported in its archiving work by ASEP in Spain. The GESIS-ZA has developed a set of Archiving Rules which are derived partly from the ISSP Working Principles.

3. Conducting the survey programme

The topics for the ISSP yearly surveys are developed over several years by a sub-committee and are pre-tested in various countries. The annual plenary meeting of the ISSP then adopts the final questionnaire. ISSP questions need to be relevant to all countries and expressed in an equivalent manner in all languages. The questionnaire is originally drafted in British English and then translated into other languages.

The ISSP has marked several new departures in the area of cross-national research. First, the collaboration between organisations is not ad hoc or intermittent, but routine and continual. Second, while necessarily more demanding than collaboration dedicated solely to cross-national research on a single topic, the ISSP makes cross-national research a basic part of the national research agenda of each participating country. Third, by combining a cross-time with a cross-national perspective, two powerful research designs are being used to study societal processes.