Infra4NextGen (I4NG) is a €9.75m project funded by the European Commission which began in March 2024.

The four-year project is bringing together outputs from key social science research infrastructures to help inform the NextGenerationEU programme and European Union youth policy.

NextGenerationEU aims for Europe ‘to build a greener, more digital and more resilient future’ with a focus on five key areas: Make it Green; Make it Digital; Make it Healthy; Make it Strong; and Make it Equal.

In each of these five areas, I4NG is re-purposing and customising existing research services to support the five themes of NextGenerationEU.

The project is being co-ordinated by the European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ESS ERIC) and includes the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC), the European Values Study (EVS) and the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) at its core.

Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives
European Social Survey
European Values Study
Generations & Gender Programme

Resources

New data on each NextGenEU theme has been collected and made available via the European Social Survey (ESS) Data Portal. Data is searchable by Wave, Country or Theme.

This panel is managed by the ESS and was administered by Centerdata over five waves in 11 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom).

Data collection via the CRONOS-3 panel has been conducted by beneficiaries in 11 countries: Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, IHS, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, ICS-UL, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, KU Leuven, National Centre for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Sciences Po, Social Science Research Center, HUN-REN TK, University of Ljubljana, University of Iceland, and University of Turku.

Post-collection weighting of the panel data has been undertaken by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Essex). Sikt – Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research ensured that the CRONOS data was processed quickly and made easily accessible to the research community.

All CRONOS-3 data and documentation is available via the ESS Data Portal. Documentation includes the final questionnaires fielded in each language, and sampling and weighting information. All ESS data is open access.

King’s College London will use evidence from the partners working on each area to plan and schedule deliberative workshops with young people (aged 18-34) in four countries. Participants will meet in forums to discuss relevant topics in each of the five themes.

An educational tool (E-NextGen) allowing data to be used in classrooms and by the general public is being implemented by European Association of Geographers EUROGEO and Tilburg University. The tool include interactive maps, infographics, blog posts, short research notes and the ability for users to position themselves on the five themes.

The inventory of survey questions has been reviewed to ascertain where data fielded in different surveys can be made more comparable. As such, harmonised and merged extracts from existing datasets are being provided to make existing data more accessible to researchers.

This work – being undertaken by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences – will also help increase sample sizes. This will allow for data collected in similar ways to be compared, even if the question wording or response scale was different.

Harmonised Data Gateway

An inventory of relevant questions on each of the five themes already fielded on cross-national surveys has been compiled. This followed a review of existing Eurobarometer, European Quality of Life Survey, ESS, GGP, EVS and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) questionnaires.

The inventory has been compiled by partners based at City, St George’s, University of London, the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and University of Milan.

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The work on compiling and reviewing existing data has been assisted by experts in each area from Cardiff University (Make it Green); Bielefeld University (Make it Digital); NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Make it Healthy); Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Make it Strong); and TÁRKI Social Research Institute and University of Birmingham (Make it Equal). These experts will also be involved in the panel questionnaire design process.

Existing survey data collated in the inventories and harmonisation process has been and summarised for a series of policy-relevant tabulations and visualisations with commentary.

Data collected via the self-completion panel survey (CRONOS-3) was analysed by the academic experts for a series of shorter publications.

Comprehensive training materials related to all project outputs and NextGenerationEU areas are being be generated by CESSDA ERIC, City, St George’s, University of London, GESIS, KNAW, ADP – Slovenian Social Science Data Archives at the University of Ljubljana, University of Milan, AUSSDA – The Austrian Social Science Data Archive with contributions from University of Vienna and University of Innsbruck

This includes online training materials, a series of 17 webinars, nine workshops, three hackathons and a short video series with demonstrations, tutorials/guides and research discussions.