The survey experiments in the GGP place it at the forefront of fieldwork innovations. In particular, the GGP was the first to roll out its cross-national fieldwork using Blaise 5.3. In doing so, the GGP has been in close consultation with other survey infrastructures, such as SHARE, partly through our participation in the EU-funded SERISS (
https://seriss.eu/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). The early adoption of Blaise 5.3 by GGP has allowed the technical team within SHARE to prepare for their own upgrade and the two operation teams maintain close contacts. The GGP is also the first cross-national survey to conduct a push-to-web experiment in which respondents can participate without any face-to-face contact. This area of survey research is however developing very fast and it is hoped that by the end of the project the GGP will have been able to include several further innovations, linking to other data sources such as social media data and administrative data.
During the months to come until the end of the project, at the technical and methodological level, one of the priorities of the GGP will be preparing and finalising the guidelines for fieldwork implementation that will incorporate the lessons learned with the fieldwork experiment. The financial and governance activities will focus on communicating the infrastructure plans and soliciting future funding and governance commitments ahead of the GGP’s ESFRI application in 2019. In addition, the Conceptual Design Report will synthesize the main recommendations derived from the findings of work packages 2, 3, 4 and 5, providing a clear vision for future developments and input for the GGP’s application for ESFRI membership.
With regards to the socio-economic impact (SEI), we conducted a thorough analysis as part of GGP-EPI. We analysed the information on socio-economic impact of GGP in 15 countries, participating in this RI. Our aim was to investigate the scope of GGP’s socio-economic impact in countries where it has been implemented, but also to reflect on challenges related to monitoring SEI of this research infrastructure and to formulate suggestions for further actions in this respect. All national representatives, who completed the questionnaire, were able to provide rich accounts of GGP’s SEI in their respective countries. Consequently, we were able to document GGP’s contribution to two specific areas, namely (1) how the GGP contributes to public discourse and policies, and (2) how it helps to develop research infrastructure and scientific community across Europe. Regarding the first of these areas, our aim was to document the GGP’s contribution to tackling major societal challenges. This was depicted by looking at GGP-based results mentioned in media and transferred to policy-makers and other stakeholders. Across all analysed countries, GGP mostly contributed to public discourse and public policies related to family, fertility, aging, quality of life, gender roles and–to a smaller extent–migration. Importantly, all these topics are related to the grand societal challenges identified by the European Commission, namely: (1) Health, demographic change and well-being; (2) Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies.
