International Social Survey Programme 2025-27 NatCen Social Research

This proposal aims to field the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) modules for 2025, 2026 and 2027 as part of NatCen’s British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, along with a separate Scottish sample as part of the Scottish Social Attitudes (SSA) survey. The ISSP is a cross-national collaboration programme that conducts annual surveys on topics that are relevant to social science researchers, academics and the wider research community. Great Britain (GB) was a founding member of the ISSP in 1984, and 44 countries are members today. Great Britain’s consistent membership of the ISSP means that we have close to 40 years of high-quality data that are systematically internationally comparable across a wide range of important research topics, which makes our continued participation in the project particularly valuable. Funding Britain’s participation in ISSP between 2025 and 2027 will prevent the creation of a data gap, and will facilitate researchers’ ability to undertake cross-country comparison of attitudes towards three subjects of significant, current social science and policy interest in GB: work orientations, the role of government, and social networks and resources. Meanwhile, the collection of a separate Scottish sample will extend the opportunities that have been created since 2019 to facilitate valuable international comparison of attitudes in Scotland. The proposal uses the British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys to collect data for each of the three ISSP modules. Collecting them in this way will allow us to meet the ISSP’s requirements on sample size, representativeness of the sample, and the inclusion of the required module questions and background variables. The proposal outlines in detail how data collection will operate through these surveys, and enable us to meet the requirement of collecting and publishing high quality data for each of the 2025-2027 modules. Given the relevance of these modules to the research community as outlined in this proposal, the published data are likely to be widely used and have a large impact. Data collected as part of previous ISSP modules has already been used in over 9,000 . Through timely archiving in line with ISSPs guidelines, the data will be made available for researchers to use as quickly as possible after fieldwork. The BSA and SSA surveys have a high profile and generally garner significant media attention, which will maximise the impact of any ISSP data included as part of the regular reporting of these surveys. We will publicise these findings with assistance from a dedicated marketing and communications team, on our website and across our social media channels. The proposal brings together a team with extensive experience of delivering high quality attitudinal surveys, including many years’ experience delivering ISSP through BSA and SSA. This includes expertise in questionnaire design, cognitive testing, data analysis, reporting of survey results and archiving. In addition, given NatCen’s involvement in a wide range of survey projects, such as the European Social Survey and Survey Futures, there are potential further benefits from cross-learning between these projects and ISSP.