ECASS

The European Centre for Analysis in the Social Sciences (ECASS) in the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) is a research infrastructure for European research and data analysis, supported by the European Commission Access to Research Infrastructures Programme.

Its aim was to help researchers gain access to existing facilities at the University of Essex by providing travel and subsistence support for short-term research visits.

ISER conducts and facilitates the empirical study of social and economic change by integrating longitudinal and cross-national European datasets, providing support services required for their analyses, and acting as the host for major substantive research programmes, primary among them being longitudinal household panel and time budget studies. ISER is a centre for the production and analysis of household panel studies and for longitudinal research (including the British Household Panel Study and the European Community Household Panel) and engages on a programme of bi- and multi-lateral exchange of panel and other data to produce merged internationally comparable datasets

ECASS offered:

• potential collaboration with researchers within ISER and participation in its research and training programmes.
• access to 7,000 significant social indicator datasets about all aspects of economic, political and social life in the UK Data Archive;
• access to University library and to ISER’s social science research resources library, which includes published and unpublished literature on survey design and data analysis, and a wide-ranging collection of survey-related documentation;
• access to a range of specialist micro-data resources within the Institute for Social and Economic Research;
• access to EUROMOD, an integrated European benefit-tax model for the (pre-2004) 15 member states of the EU. Work is currently underway to incorporate the 10 newer member states into EUROMOD. The Microsimulation Unit which maintains and develops the EUROMOD database is based at ISER. (Please contact the Euromod team (euromod at essex.ac.uk) first if you are considering an application based on these data.)