ESRA 2025 sessions by theme

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To expand our understanding of and have an impact on the major social challenges of the coming decades, including digitization, climate change, growing diversification, pandemics, and war-induced societal changes, the social sciences need to unlock new opportunities for collecting and analyzing data. Many countries have a set of well-established longitudinal survey programs, but surveys are plagued with fundamental challenges related to validity, cost, and sustainability. Therefore, systematic and far-sighted social science research needs to explore the potential of recent technological advances and explore new forms of data, new methods of data acquisition, and new measures of data quality.

Developing and utilizing such new data sources and data infrastructures necessitates the bundling and orchestrating of skills, knowledge, and expertise across different fields of empirical social sciences and computer sciences, which can only be managed by large-scale research programs. To achieve these goals, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has established the long-term infrastructure priority program “New Data Spaces for the Social Sciences” to open up and develop such new data spaces (https://www.new-data-spaces.de/en-us/). Within this program, a series of highly innovative research projects in four main research areas were funded: exploration and integration of different data types, respondent-driven designs, instrument validity, and multimodal data acquisition. The purpose of this session is to introduce this program, present first results of research projects funded within this program, and foster exchange with initiators and researchers who are active in similar programs in other countries.