Data Base Development

1974年，欧共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9个成员国（法国、西德、英国、意大利、荷兰、比利时、丹麦、爱尔兰和卢森堡）中具有代表性的国家公众样本的社会和政治态度。1980年10月，随着希腊的加入，接受调查的国家增加到10个；1985年10月，西班牙和葡萄牙加入后，这一数字增加到12个。在每年的春季和秋季进行，到1987年底共完成了28次欧洲晴雨表调查。除了定期获得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等方面的读数外，鉴于欧元晴雨表还探索了各种特殊主题，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。欧洲共同体委员会主持这些调查，以便获得关于各成员国公众舆论现状的反馈；它本身并不资助社会科学研究。因此，委员会没有为数据的清理或存档提供经费。实地工作结束后，立即编制一套表格，为向委员会提交一年两次的报告提供基础。然后，这些数据将以普通用户难以使用的方式转交给该项目的主要研究者。这些数据没有经过清理，它们的编码和格式因国家和调查而异。此外，除了各国使用的各种语文的调查表之外，没有代码本，也没有任何文件。该项目向社会科学家提供每年春季和秋季在12个欧洲共同体国家进行的跨国调查。首席研究员将获取数据，对其进行清理，以跨国家标准的形式重新编码，为每个调查准备机器可读的代码本，并通过密歇根大学政治和社会研究跨大学联盟调查数据档案分发。这些数据对社会科学界的价值的一个指标是对迄今为止发布的调查的广泛需求。欧洲共同体调查已成为该联盟处理的第三大最广泛要求的数据集，仅次于国家选举研究和国家民意研究中心综合社会调查。在比较政治学领域，没有什么能达到它们的使用水平。这些数据集已提供给200多个不同的机构，其中一些是为整个国家服务的外国调查数据档案。这些数据每年用于政治学、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.