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This session–as part of a series established during the last ESRA–focuses on central methodological questions and advancements dealing with panel performance. The focus is on access to target persons and aspects of panel maintenance in the broadest sense.
Over the last decades, sophisticated survey-methodological possibilities for surveying have increasingly emerged alongside data-driven methods and digitization. On the other hand, public confidence in data-processing operations as well as in abstract systems in general (such as science, economy, politics, or technology) declined. Hence, there are challenges for survey processes that should be addressed in this session.

One of the main challenges for sustainable panel performance nowadays arises from structures that threaten the privacy or the expected outcome of action in participants’ everyday lives. Big data sampling structures with opaque and imponderable intentions and/or institutions such as Google and Facebook raise questions in public discourse about data confidentiality and security through their current ways of acting; thus endangering scientific surveying on a voluntary basis. In order to deal with these challenges, we propagate the visible establishment of a different model. Inspired by sociologists Luhmann and Giddens, we call it “Trust by Procedure”. Trust from this point of view arises mainly from transparency and continuity in procedure (and staff). For all the gatekeepers, respondents, and the researchers who develop instrumentation and/or work with the data later on, the study, their products, and the team behind it must be seen as trustworthy. In terms of scientific discourses, this means not to emphasize the “total survey error” idea only, but also the quality and trustworthiness in the survey process, from access to participants to data usage by the scientific community and the public in general. Trust needs time and proof by own experience. But how should trust be addressed and built up during fieldwork, between the researchers and the public? It requires a conviction that people behind the study represent competence, predictability, and reliability.

Thus, experiences, best-practices, and suggestions, as well as theoretical deliberations regarding fieldwork strategies, monitoring and evaluation systems, and sense-driven panel maintenance strategies to establish trust shall be the focus of this session.