Event

Designing for comparability in a 3MC survey: Methodological experiments from the 2024 EWCS

This event is organised as part of the ongoing City St Georges, ESS and NatCen webinar series

Event time:

18th March 2026 12:00 – 13:00
Format:

online

The European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) is one of Europe’s largest comparative worker surveys and a long-standing reference for monitoring working conditions and job quality.

Its 8th edition (EWCS 2024) was implemented using a parallel face to face and online (push-to-web) design, alongside a coordinated programme of methodological experiments designed to test how targeted innovations influence data quality, cost efficiency and cross-national comparability in a multinational, multiregional and multicultural (3MC) setting.

This webinar synthesises evidence from embedded experiments spanning key stages of the survey lifecycle. It covers alternative within-household selection procedures for multi-respondent designs; telephone recruitment strategies; incentive schemes; mode effects between interviewer-administered and self-completion instruments; and questionnaire length and modular design.

Impacts are assessed on response rates, cost indicators, response distributions and multiple dimensions of data quality, including response differentiation, respondent engagement and the quality of open-ended responses.

Across experiments, results show a consistent pattern: shorter questionnaires and higher incentives can increase response rates and improve cost efficiency without materially increasing response bias. However, these approaches may reduce informational depth, underscoring a practical trade-off between efficiency and content coverage.

Drawing together findings across 16 research questions, EWCS 2024 represents one of the largest 3MC methodological evaluation programmes conducted to date.

The webinar concludes by situating these results in the reality of Europe’s heterogeneous survey landscape: wide variation in sampling frames, register coverage, contractibility, legal constraints, digital access, and the feasibility and acceptability of interviewer-administered fieldwork.

Against this backdrop, we discuss what “probability-based” should look like in practice across countries, and whether a single unimode design can realistically safeguard comparability, or whether mixed-mode and parallel-run strategies are the more defensible route to sustaining representativeness, trend continuity and operational resilience across the European Union.

Speaker

Tanja Kimova

Head of Evidence for the European Union and Multilateral Institutions at Verian

Tanja Kimova is Head of Evidence for the European Union and Multilateral Institutions at Verian, with over 20 years of experience leading large-scale, high-quality multinational, multiregional and multicultural (3MC) research for European and international clients, including Eurofound, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the Joint Research Centre (JRC), and the PEW Research Centre. Her expertise spans the full survey lifecycle, from research design and probability sampling through fieldwork delivery, quality assurance, weighting and analysis, and reporting. She specialises in mixed-mode and probability-based methodologies, cross-national comparability, and building operational QA frameworks that strengthen data quality at scale, with a particular focus on response rate optimisation, non-response bias mitigation, and technology-led improvements to efficiency and control. Gijs van Houten is a senior research manager in the Employment unit at Eurofound. He has specific expertise in cross-national survey methodology and the analysis of workplace practices and organisational strategies. He currently leads the preparations for the European Company Survey 2028, is in charge of methodology for the European Quality of Life Survey 2026, and is analysing the online data collected as part of the European Working Conditions Survey 2024, which will inform decision making on the future of surveys in Eurofound. Before joining Eurofound in 2010, he worked at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP). Gijs spent a year away in 2016, working at the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC. He holds a Masters in Sociology from Radboud University Nijmegen and a PhD in Social Science from Utrecht University.