Representativeness studies start with a kick-off meeting organised in cooperation with the European Commission’s Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMPL), where the European social partners and other relevant sectoral organisations are informed about the study. The European organisations are subsequently asked to provide a list of their member organisations with contact person details in order to allow Eurofound to contact the member organisations effectively and to collect the necessary data for the purpose of the study.
Eurofound has a network of national experts, one (or more) in each of the EU Member States. They are collecting information, for the purpose of representativeness studies, but also for other Eurofound research projects. Eurofound designs a questionnaire to be used in the data collection process by these Eurofound national correspondents. If required, the European social partners are consulted on the draft versions of the questionnaire to ensure relevant information is collected for each sector. Once the data collection at national level is finalised, Eurofound runs a quality check and makes the necessary adjustments to ensure high quality information is gathered. Data from other sources are also gathered, such as statistical data from Eurostat or other published studies on the sector. The entire process of collecting all the data at national level, including the checking and updating, can take up to six months.
In the next stage, information from the 27 national reports is gathered together in an overview report. Part of this work is outsourced to external researchers, which is carefully managed by the Eurofound project manager. It is the role of the Eurofound project manager to liaise with the European Commission, the European social partners, the national correspondents and the individual researchers working on the overview report of a representativeness study. This may involve cross checking of information to ensure the quality of the report.
Subsequently, an informal consultation of the European social partners involved in the sector follows, after which the report is reworked based on comments received. The resulting final draft is formally evaluated by Eurofound’s Industrial Relations Advisory Committee in conjunction with the European social partners from the given sector. After the formal evaluation, the representativeness study is edited and published on the Eurofound website.
For every stage of this process, the contact person at Eurofound is: Peter.Kerckhofs@eurofound.europa.eu