Referring to the increasingly challenging ambitions of the EU2020 strategy, the InGRID-2 project sets out to advance the integration and innovation of distributed social sciences research infrastructures on ‘poverty, living conditions and social policies’ and ‘working conditions, vulnerability and labour policies’. With the EU2020 strategy, European policy-makers aim to overcome the structural weaknesses in the EU’s economy, improve its competitiveness and productivity and underpin a sustainable social market economy. To this end, policy-makers need to be equipped with evidence-based insights into the challenges related to social exclusion, vulnerability-at-work, and related issues, as well as the strategies that can be used to advance in this area.
Being a research infrastructure project, InGRID-2 aims to provide the scientific community with resources and services to conduct top-level research contributing to inclusive growth. Key tools in this social science research are all types of data: statistics on earnings, administrative social data, labour market data, surveys of quality of life or working conditions, and policy indicators. In the social sciences, such sources tend to be difficult to access, based on different conceptualisations and approaches, and highly distributed, complicating comparative research. Helping scientists to enhance their expertise on inclusive growth from data to policy is the mission of InGRID-2. InGRID-2 serves pre-users, lead users and end users. Especially lead users, who are social scientists involved in comparative research to provide new evidence for European policy innovations, are an important target group for InGRID-2. The focus areas on InGRID-2 are a) integrated and harmonised data, (b) links between policy and practice, and (c) indicator-building tools.
Building on the foundations laid in InGRID-1, InGRID-2 will extend transnational on-site and virtual access, organise mutual learning and discussions of innovations, and improve data services and facilities of comparative research. Extending the research infrastructure to all EU countries is an important mission on the agenda for InGRID-2, in which virtual access plays a key role. Short and long-term visiting grants allow researchers to experiment with and work on key data sets and tools within a context of mutual knowledge exchange and cross-fertilisation. In addition, a research portal is set up to serve as the gateway to the InGRID-2 infrastructure. Networking activities will provide initiation (summer schools), in-depth discussions (expert workshops), and help promote necessary innovations for sustainable inclusive growth (through data forums, special interest group meetings, stakeholder platform conferences, round tables and an experts-in-residence programme).
Key science actors and their stakeholders are coupled in the consortium to provide expert services to users of comparative research infrastructures by investing in collaborative efforts to better integrate micro-data, identify new ways of collecting data, establish and improve harmonised classification tools, extend available policy databases, optimise statistical quality, and set-up microsimulation environments and indicator-building tools as important means of valorisation. This work is performed through a number of joint research activities, which concentrate on extending data integration, exploring new data linkage and sources, innovating microsimulation tools, improving comparative policy data, and investigating new high-quality indicators.
InGRID-2 brings together 19 partners from 14 EU Member States.
