SSÖ - Social Survey Austria

The Social Survey Austria (SSÖ) is a research program to monitor changes in attitudes and values in the Austrian population.

  • The questionnaire consists of annual modules of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) which are fielded in about 45 countries, and a national section with questions on current Austrian social issues. The surveys are based on a representative sample of the Austrian resident population aged 16 and over.
  • The teplication of sets of questions in the successive survey waves and the combination of SSÖ and ISSP make it possible to study societal developments and social change in Austria over time as well as in comparative perspective.
  • The surveys are jointly designed by a team of social scientists from the Universities of Graz, Linz, Salzburg and Vienna. The SSÖ thus also fosters cooperation and networking among social scientists in Austria.
  • So far, SSÖ has been conducted six times - in the years 1986, 1993, 2003, 2016, 2018 and 2021. In 2016, an additional survey was conducted among migrants with Turkish, Bosnian, Serbian or Croatian roots.
  • The Austrian data are available at the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA).
  • The international datasets are archived at GESIS.
  • All Data are available to interested users free of charge. A cumulative data set that includes the first four survey waves (1986 to 2016) is also available.

SSÖ during the Corona Crisis

In order to capture the societal impact of the Corona crisis, the SSÖ team participated in two survey programmes, namely the international Values in Crisis survey programme and the Austrian Corona Panel Project of the University of Vienna.

 

Values in Crisis

Values in Crisis (VIC) is an international survey programme with questions on the perception of the COVID pandemic as well as selected items from the World Value Survey questionnaire. Approximately 15 countries participated in the first wave of the survey, which was conducted between May and October 2020, including Germany, Great Britain, Austria and Sweden. The second wave of the survey was conducted in 2021. A final survey wave is planned to take place in 2022.

In Austria, the first survey wave was collected in August 2020, and the second survey wave was conducted in April 2021.

You can find the data set and documentation of the first wave of the VIC in the AUSSDA Dataverse.

For more information on VIC, please visit the World Values Survey Homepage.

 

Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP)

The ACPP is an interdisciplinary panel study of the University of Vienna. From March to June 2020, approx. 1500 people were interviewed weekly. Since July 2020, the panel waves have taken place monthly. The study collects data on people’s experience with Corona, mental and physical well-being, media consumption and information behaviour as well as attitudes towards the government's Corona measures and the social, political and economic consequences of the crisis. The SSÖ team participated in several waves of the ACPP with items from past SSÖ surveys as well as new items on the change in values during the Corona crisis.

Analyses of the current survey waves of the ACPP are continuously shared with a broad public in the ACPP Corona Blog.

ACPP website: viecer.univie.ac.at/coronapanel/

ACPP Corona Blog: viecer.univie.ac.at/coronapanel/corona-blog/

ACPP data: data.aussda.at/dataset.xhtml

SSÖ VI - 2021

The planned 2020 SSÖ survey was postponed due to the Corona crisis, as a face-to-face survey was not possible at that time. The SSÖ then was conducted in summer 2021 as a mixed-mode survey with both phone and face-to-face interviews.

Central themes for the 2021 SSÖ were social inequality, environmental attitudes, and impacts of the Corona Crisis.

  • You can find all data reports on the results of the Social Survey 2021 (in German) here.
  • The datasets of the SSÖ 2021 are archived in the AUSSDA Dataverse.