The Factual Data Obtained from Eurobarometer Surveys: how they Help in Describing the Member States

Abstract

Although the Eurobarometer surveys serve, first and foremost, to measure opinion across the Community, factual questions have always had a place in them. By factual questions we mean all those where the people interviewed are asked not to express judgement, opinion, preference or viewpoint, but rather to describe their situation (generally personal) or past or future actions. Indeed, these factual questions make up the larger part of the socio-demographic section in the questionnaires, giving us information on the respondent’s age and occupation, the occupation of the head of household, household income, the number of people the household comprises, and so on. Generally these factual data are used for analysing people’s answers to questions probing into their opinions, but quite often they can also serve a wider purpose in that they throw up hitherto unknown information. The object of this paper is to present some of these data and to show the interest there can be in using Eurobarometer surveys in this way to obtain a clearer picture of the people making up the Community.