ESRA Early Career Researcher Award 2025

The European Survey Research Association invites early career researchers to submit a paper for consideration for the 2025 ESRA Early Career Researcher Award. The author(s) of the winning paper will be announced at the ESRA conference in July 2025, and will receive a cash prize of Є500.

Criteria

The competition is intended to recognize excellence in research by scholars at an early stage in their careers. Papers are welcome in any field related to survey research broadly defined, including research on: theoretical issues in survey methodology; the use of statistical techniques in the design, adjustment, or analysis of survey data; and innovative empirical applications of survey methodology. Papers should be less than 7000 words (excluding the title page, abstract, tables, references and appendices). The papers should be complete and should be based on the abstracts accepted by the organisers for presentation at the 2025 ESRA conference.

Eligibility

The competition is open to researchers within two years of the completion of their doctorate or within five years of starting a career in survey research. They must therefore have completed their PhD no earlier than July 1, 2023, or started a career in survey research after 2019, or still be registered university students. Eligibility is limited to papers that will be presented at the 2025 ESRA Conference. Nominated papers may have more than one author, but will only be eligible for the prize if: (a) all authors satisfy the Early Career Researcher Award eligibility rules; or (b) the first author does satisfy the requirements and any additional author is part of the PhD supervisory team.

Review Committee

The winning paper will be selected by a review committee composed of ESRA board members and by external experts in survey research. The papers will be judged based on the quality of research design, originality, significance, organization, and presentation. Moreover, ESRA will also consider in their evaluation whether papers are based on yet unpublished research and whether papers are written by either a single early career scholar or a team of them.

Paper Submission for the 2025 Competition

When submitting your abstract, please already acknowledge that, you want to be considered for the Early Career Research Award (and only when you meet the eligibility criteria). Once your abstract has been accepted, we will contact and ask you to upload your paper not later than May 1, 2025. Note that full papers must include a blinded and unblinded copy. The blinded copy should contain a title page and abstract, but all identifying information about the author, acknowledgements, and other identifiers should be removed. Moreover, in case a paper includes authors (PhD supervisors) that do not fulfil the Early Career Researcher Award eligibility rules, a separate document has to be provided in which the contributions of each author are detailed (max. 1 page).