*** apologies for cross-postings ***

Dear colleagues,

There are only a few days left to submit an abstract for the ESRA conference, which is taking place from July 17th to July 21st in Lisbon, Portugal. We can offer three interesting sessions for submissions. One is dealing with a pressing issue of contemporary Europe (societal pessimism), one is dealing with a specific group (surveying the elderly) and the last one is dealing with an exotic topic (failed research).

Please submit paper abstracts till the 4th December 2016! You can upload them via the conference online system (http://www.europeansurveyresearch.org/conference).

Please have a look at our session description: "Reflections on failed research" (organized by Martin Weichbold, Wolfgang Aschauer, Nina Baur & Dimitri Prandner). We highly welcome your submissions!

At conferences we usually hear about remarkable outcomes in scientific research: Colleagues report how they achieved striking results, using sophisticated research designs and applying complex analytical tools. But everybody who has ever conducted research by him/herself knows that during the research process not necessarily everything runs smoothly. Of course, dealing with unforeseen difficulties is an essential part of empirical research, but sometimes we have to admit that certain decisions were wrong, a research strategy didn't work out or maybe even the whole research project failed in the end. This session wants to provide space to discuss research attempts that finally disappeared in a drawer. The aim of the session is not to make someone look like a fool or to satisfy the other's curiosity, but to reflect on causes of failed research and to learn from mistakes. As failing is not always a matter of the researchers' incompetence but can have multiple reasons, reporting what happened - and why - this session may be a step forward to prevent others from making the same mistakes. In our proposal the term "failed" should be understood in a broad sense: reasons can reach from practical things (difficult access to the field, problems with funding, external incidents...), methodical problems (bad questionnaire, inappropriate survey period, sampling difficulties, problems with interviewers, etc. ...) to methodological misconceptions (incoherent or too complex research design, incompatibilities of different parts of the study,...) or theoretical issues (difficulties in the implementation of theoretical concepts for empirical research,...). We encourage researchers to present their reflections on failed research projects. The session should provide an open platform to discuss about difficulties in our daily research activities and to encourage a new code of practice - not to ignore failed research but to learn from it.

You are also encouraged to submit abstracts to our topic: Societal pessimism in Europe - Addressing societal change by focusing on EU Citizens' Perceptions of Crisis (Organized by Wolfgang Aschauer & Martin Weichbold)

Eight years after the beginning of the financial crisis, starting in the United States in 2008, the European Union is still in a state of crisis; we can even observe an accumulation of contemporary challenges for the EU. All those critical outbreaks of events (e.g. the Mediterranean crisis of public debt, the conflict in Ukraine, the contemporary refugee flows to Europe or the Brexit vote in Great Britain in June 2016) have contributed to a high level of euroscepticism or are clear signs of political alienation threatening solidarity between EU member states and social cohesion within European countries. Due to pessimistic concerns regarding the European integration process, it is not easy for European citizens to remain progressively oriented towards contemporary societal developments. During the last years a vague sense of dissatisfaction with society is spreading in many European countries. This is particularly affecting the so-called losers of modernity but also the middle classes of society seem to face more constraints in societal well-being. Certain expressions of societal pessimism can be characterized by fears of societal descent, feelings of anomie and decreasing levels of political and personal trust. It is obvious that those restrictions concerning quality of life in European societies are also mainly responsible for the rise of populist parties and ethnic prejudice in many European societies. It is necessary to theoretically derive new concepts of quality of society taking these impressions of societal decline adequately into account. In this proposed session we search for innovative approaches to measure and evaluate new cleavages in societal embeddedness and societal belonging in contemporary European societies. We especially aim for empirical studies which highlight changes in societal wellbeing over the course of the last years and which try to monitor societal change by focusing on attitudinal data concerning societal functioning (e.g. operationalizing value polarizations, aspects of social cohesion or satisfaction and trust with institutions or with society in general). Survey researchers in Europe trying to analyse the causes of societal pessimism, especially dealing with multifaceted characteristics of subjective crises perceptions or focusing on consequences of those impressions of societal pessimism within single case studies or in a cross-national perspective are highly welcome to submit their contributions.

You are finally invited to submit abstracts to the session: Surveying elderly and people with age-associated cognitive impairment - barriers, challenges and opportunities (Organized by Patrick Kutschar & Martin Weichbold)

Taking a survey basically assumes respondents to be able to understand the questions and to be aware of their answers. But what if these assumptions have to be doubted? In this session we want to discuss the challenges of surveying old people with or without cognitive impairments. Ageing is not causally linked but often accompanied by multifaceted changes and declines in cognitive functions. Against this background, we want to ask for the consequences and specifities which should be taken into account when dealing with such special populations in survey research.

Methodological research on the quality of data obtained by standardized surveys in such vulnerable, multi-morbid older populations especially with restrictions in cognitive function is rather scarce. Implementing fixed age-limits as it is common in some general population survey programmes and national traditions seems not to be an appropriate solution, especially in times of societal ageing. On the contrary, the demand for information about these people is rapidly growing and standardized surveys are applied in gerontological, medical, health care, or social science studies, for instance to examine quality of life or to evaluate satisfaction with perceived care services.

We encourage researchers to share their experiences and suggestions for surveying cognitively impaired and/or old people. Presentations should cover - not exclusively, but predominantly - the following topics:

- Special sampling strategies for these population groups

- Screening instruments or strategies to measure cognitive impairment and to determine the ability to survey participation

- Experiences with the implementation of thresholds in terms of cognitive impairment to obtain vaild and reliable data

- Findings about data quality in surveys with elderly people or people with restrictions in cognitive functions

- Experiences with the linkage of additional measures (e.g. biomarkers, proxy interviewing or non-reactive process-produced data) to the primary survey data

- Alternative (quantitative) data collection strategies apart from the strict standardized approach

Best regards,

Assoz.-Prof. PD. Dr. Wolfgang Aschauer Fachbereich Politikwissenschaft und Soziologie Abteilung Soziologie und Kulturwissenschaft Universität Salzburg Rudolfkai 42 5020 Salzburg e-mail: wolfgang.aschauer@sbg.ac.atmailto:wolfgang.aschauer@sbg.ac.at Homepage: www.uni-salzburg.at/soziologie/aschauerhttp://www.uni-salzburg.at/soziologie/aschauer