towards a European welfare survey

Euromodule je raziskovalna iniciativa katere cilj je nadziranje in sistematska analiza trenutnega stanja in spremembe življenjskih pogojev in kvalitete življenja v Evropi v primerjalni perspektivi.The Euromodule is a research initiative whose aim is to strengthen efforts to monitor and systematically analyze the current state of affairs and the changes in living conditions and quality of life in Europe in a comparative perspective. The initiative stands in the tradition of the social indicators movement, which enjoyed its takeoff in the late 1960s and during the 1970s. The OECD, the United Nations, Eurostat and other organizations gave rise to a multitude of social reports and a lot of continued periodic publications. Moreover, these organizations produced huge compendia of social indicators for world regions or the world as a whole themselves, mainly consisting of aggregated data at the level of nation states. The Euromodule ties on to cross-national research tradition. The use of social surveys is seen as the preferred method for studying living conditions and subjective well-being. As aggregated figures often used in social reporting can not be related to individuals, microdata stemming from surveys are the best opportunity to understand the distribution of welfare within a society, the relationship between different life domains, and the way quality of life is connected to socio-demographic characteristics. Survey research offer the possibility to combine individual living conditions and subjective characteristics - and it also has proved to be a flexible tool for comparative welfare research across nations