EQLS 2007 - Questionnaire

The questionnaire of the European Quality of Life Survey covers a broad spectrum of life domains with an emphasis on income and financial situation, education, housing and local environment, family relations, work, health, work-life balance, subjective well-being, social participation, quality of social services and quality of society.

The questionnaire, in common with previous edition of the EQLS, was reviewed and improved in close cooperation with the Social Science Centre (WZB) questionnaire development group. While the priority was to retain core questions to enable time series and trend analysis, a certain number of new areas were identified where the survey’s scope could be usefully extended (e.g. quality of local environment, mental health, attitudes toward migrants).

Many of the questions asked in the first EQLS in 2003 were asked again, on such issues as employment, income, education, housing, family, health, work–life balance, life satisfaction and perceived quality of society. Being in possession of two sets of data will allow the research team to gauge how people’s lives have changed in the intervening years.

New questions introduced were, wherever possible, based on questions already successfully used in other similar national surveys. In the case of certain background variables such as education level, occupation and net household income, more adjustments have been made in order to increase the quality of analytical variables and contribute to the enrichment of analytical possibilities.

The draft version of the master questionnaire was tested in the pilot survey. The pilot survey was conducted from 7 -15 July 2007 in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, with 100 interviews in each country. The results from the pilot survey were subsequently analysed in order to detect any problematic items, especially those resulting in non-response.

Interviews were conducted in the national languages of each country. The master questionnaire was translated into 30 different languages, with seven of them used in more than one country. The translations were done in accordance with current good practices in multilingual translation of international survey questionnaires.

For trend questions, existing translations from previous surveys were retained except in a small number of cases where problems were identified and new revised translations introduced. For new and modified questions, the English master version was subject to parallel translation into the main target languages by independent translators familiar with survey research in the living conditions area.

These parallel translations were merged into a final draft which was then translated back into English to identify and resolve remaining problems or ambiguities. A number of the translations were also subject to final review by Eurofound research managers and national experts from the expert development questionnaire group who assisted the Eurofound in this task.

The translated versions of national questionnaires were pre-tested. The pre-test was conducted in all countries participating in the survey except Macedonia, which joined the whole operation later, when no time for pre-testing was left. The pre-test consisted of 25 interviews per country, conducted from 20 27 August 2007.

Below is the list of languages for each country.