Data Base Development

1974年，欧洲共同体委员会启动了欧洲晴雨表调查，这是一项调查研究计划，旨在定期监测法国、西德、英国、意大利、荷兰、比利时、丹麦、爱尔兰和卢森堡这九个成员国具有代表性的国家公众的社会和政治态度。1980年10月，随着希腊的加入，被调查的国家增加到10个；1985年10月，西班牙和葡萄牙加入，调查的国家增加到12个。在每年春秋两季进行的调查中，到1987年底共完成了28项欧洲晴雨表调查。除了定期获得关于对欧洲一体化的支持、国家目标和政治问题、政党偏好、意识形态取向和主观幸福感的读数外，《欧洲晴雨表》还探讨了各种特殊主题，如对贫困和失业的态度、性别角色、人际信任、能源和环境问题、对工作的态度和对科学技术的态度。欧洲共同体委员会赞助这些调查，以便获得对成员国当前舆论状况的反馈；委员会本身并不资助社会科学研究。因此，委员会没有为清理或存档数据提供资金。实地考察结束后，立即编制了一套表格，为向委员会提交一年两次的报告提供依据。然后，在普通用户难以使用的情况下，将数据移交给该项目的首席调查员。数据尚未清理，其编码和格式因国家而异，因调查而异。此外，除了各自国家使用的各种语文的调查问卷外，没有编码簿，几乎没有任何类型的文件。该项目向社会科学家提供了每年春季和秋季在12个欧洲共同体国家中每一个国家进行的跨国调查。首席调查员将获取数据，对它们进行清理，以跨国标准化的形式重新编码，为每项调查准备机器可读的代码簿，并通过密歇根大学的大学间政治和社会研究联盟调查数据档案馆分发这些数据。这些数据对社会科学界的价值的一个指标是对迄今已公布的调查的广泛需求。欧洲共同体的调查已经成为该联盟处理的第三大最受欢迎的数据集，排名紧随国家选举研究和国家民意研究中心综合社会调查之后。在比较政治学领域，没有任何东西能达到它们的使用水平。这些数据集已经提供给了200多家不同的机构，其中几家是服务于整个国家的外国调查数据档案。这些数据每年被用于政治学、社会心理学、社会学和经济学领域的数十种出版物。

In 1974, the Commission of the European Communities launched the Euro-Barometer surveys, a survey research program designed to provide regular monitoring of the social and political attitudes of representative national samples of the public of the nine- member nations, France, West Germany, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland and Luxembourg. The number of countries surveyed increased to ten in October, 1980, with the entry of Greece; and the number increased to twelve, with the addition of Spain and Portugal in October, 1985. Carried out in the Spring and Fall of each year, a total of 28 Euro-Barometer surveys had been completed by the end of 1987. In addition to obtaining regular readings on support for European integration, national goals and political issues, political party preferences, ideological orientations and subjective well-being, given Euro-Barometers have explored a variety of special topics such as attitudes toward poverty and unemployment, gender roles, interpersonal trust, energy and environmental problems, attitudes toward work and attitudes toward science and technology. The Commission of the European Communities sponsors these surveys in order to obtain feedback about the current state of public opinion in the member countries; it does not finance social science research per se. Accordingly, the Commission provides no funds for cleaning or archiving the data. Immediately after fieldwork, a set of tabulations is run to provide the basis for a twice-yearly report to the Commission. The data are then turned over to this project's principal investigator in a condition that the average user would find difficult to utilize. The data have not been cleaned, and their coding and format vary from country to country and from one survey to the next. Moreover, there is no codebook and little documentation of any kind beyond the questionnaires in the various languages used in the respective countries. This project makes available to social scientists the body of cross-national surveys carried out each Spring and Fall in each of the 12 European Community countries. The principal investigator will acquire the data, clean them, recode them in cross-nationally standardized form, prepare machine-readable codebooks for each survey and distribute them through the Inter- university Consortium for Political and Social Research survey data archive at the University of Michigan. One indicator of the value these data have for the social science community is the widespread demand for the surveys that have been released to date. The European Community surveys have become the third most widely-requested datasets handled by the Consortium, ranking immediately after the National Election Studies and the National Opinion Research Center General Social Surveys. In the field of Comparative Politics, nothing approaches their level of use. The datasets have been furnished to well over 200 different institutions, several of which are foreign survey data archives that service entire nations. The data are utilized in scores of publications each year, in the fields of political science, social psychology, sociology and economics.