On January 1st, 2008, the PPSM projects get down to working. Shortly before the German Research Foundation gave the go-ahead for the start of the programme with altogether ten projects in the first funding period of two years. Foregone has been the establishment of the programme by the DFG senate on April 6th, 2006, a call for proposals, and an assessment of the submitted proposals by an international group of reviewers. The German Research Foundation provides the six-years term of the programme with financial limits of 6.72 Mio. Euro.
Scientific surveys represent an indispensable instrument of social research. At the same time, they have a significant social influence if their results contribute to public opinion formation, to decision making in politics and jurisdiction as well as to administrative acts, if they lead into scientific diagnoses, causal analyses and prognoses or if they lead into economic decisions. Therefore it is of essential importance, that no wrong, distorted, vague or misleading conclusions are drawn from the results of scientific surveys.
In practice, however, the required survey quality cannot be attested unquestionably, either because the quality is not always achieved or because there is simply no attempt to judge it. In view of all the potential sources of error surveys may suffer from, this is a remarkable situation. The list of potential sources of error is deadly long; just to name some examples: responses which may be affected by the survey mode, by question wordings, by response scale formats and required memory tasks; or responses which are simply affected by the motive to avoid socially undesirable responses. Samples biased by self-selection processes and hence sample estimates which can only fail to hit their targets, represent another example of the possibility that survey results may draw false pictures of reality.
This situation will become the more precarious the more social change and technological progress challenge the present way of conducting survey research: First, the bases of survey cooperation change under the influence of social change. Secondly, technological progress produces options which are used increasingly in practice of social research, however without needed basic research having taken place beforehand. A prime example is the widespread implementation of "Online Access Panels" by which research institutes react to the technical options of the Internet. Further challenges add, for instance the trend to be accessible only by mobile phones, that is to say by completely renouncing ground-based telephones and thus the standard access for telephone survey.
The Priority Programme aims correspondingly at advancing the survey design in such a way that it masters better than before relevant sources of error while meeting the demands of social change and technological progress. Correspondingly all large fields of survey methodology appear on the agenda, be it survey nonresponse, survey measurement, survey mode or survey sampling, and the research questions located therein and in their areas of intersection.
The Priority Programme is coordinated at the University of Bremen.
