Dear Colleagues,

The 5th European Survey Research Association (ESRA) conference will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia from July 15-19, 2013. We invite you to submit a presentation to our session *Analyzing, standardizing and harmonizing field reports*

While most surveys document substantive methodological concerns in field reports and make those usually available to data users, field reports are seldom used in research on survey methodology. We recently find an increasing number of studies exploiting paradata, such as data on interviewer characteristics (voice, communication skills, convincing strategies, etc.) or for example the time and day of each single interview. Usually, such studies are based on paradata from one survey only.

Field reports may be regarded as an alternative source of paradata. Though paradata are then aggregated on a higher level, a database of multiple field reports is highly informative for survey research:

- How does the interview mode affect nonresponse? - How does the number of contacts affect attrition bias? - What is the effect of different institutions (universities versus commercial firms) sponsoring the survey on response rates, etc.?

In this session, we invite presentations that use field reports (and possibly others sources of aggregated paradata) in order to address methodological concerns as for instance nonresponse, attrition bias and sampling errors. We also encourage colleagues to submit presentation proposals addressing the standardization and harmonization of field reports and such that deal with the coding of field reports into data that can be analysed in next steps.

For submitting an abstract, please log onto the ESRA website,http://www.europeansurveyresearch.org/conferences/register. The deadline for abstract submission is January 13, 2013. During the submission process, you will be asked to select the area of survey methodology to which your presentation belongs. Here, please select "Paradata and Fieldwork" and then the title of this session: "Analyzing, standardizing and harmonizing field reports".

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries about the session. Thank you very much and best regards

Benjamin Gedon, LMU Munich, Germany,benjamin.gedon@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de Gerrit Bauer, LMU Munich, Germany,gerrit.bauer@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de