Living in Britain is a survey that measures social attitudes, beliefs and behaviour of people. Similar studies are carried out in other European countries, and together these are called the European Social Survey.
The European Social Survey ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) is responsible for the European Social Survey (ESS). The survey is run in 30+ countries in Europe every two years. Questions are asked about you and your household, your attitudes, life events and the area you live in.
Protecting your personal information is important to us. In this leaflet we explain how we process your information and which rights you have.
If you are under 16 years of age at the time you complete the survey, permission from a parent or guardian is required for you to participate. To give permission, their parent or guardian should contact the Living in Britain team at freephone 0808 296 8584 or by email at support@livinginbritain.co.uk.
Anything that can identify you is considered ‘personal data’ and is protected by law.
This includes your name, address and other contact details. Some types of information are known as special category personal data, such as information about your health, trade union membership and political opinions. ESS collects all these types of personal data.
If you start the survey online but do not complete it, we will use the information you have provided up to that point, unless you tell us not to (see section 6. Your rights, below).
Your address has been randomly selected from the Postal Address File to participate in the survey. We need to select participants aged 15 or older randomly to ensure we include the views of the range of different groups in Britain. Your contact details are always stored separately from your survey answers.
You are invited to complete the ESS online or on paper. If you choose to complete the survey online, we will collect some extra information. For example, how long it took you to answer each question and the type of device you used to complete the survey. This helps us learn about people’s experience of completing the survey and may inform changes we make in the future.
The ESS in Britain takes place in 2026. We will delete your contact information by June 2027. We will remove all directly identifying personal information and store your survey responses indefinitely at the ESS ERIC Data Archive.
A number of organisations are involved in the ESS. The ESS ERIC has agreements with all of them to make sure that your personal information is secure and only used for the research purpose described in this leaflet.
ESS HQ, based at City St. George’s, University of London has appointed the fieldwork organisation Opinion42 to administer the survey. The ESS ERIC also has agreements with the organisations developing and running the survey, its online platform, and with the ESS ERIC Data Archive. For detailed information on these organisations, see ESS ERIC’s privacy notice at www.europeansocialsurvey.org/about/privacy.html
If information is transferred between the organisations involved in the ESS, this is done securely. Any transfer to the UK is based on the European Commission Adequacy Decision of December 2025 covering the transfer of personal data from the EU to the UK.
Because of the questions we ask there is a slight possibility that your responses, when combined, may identify you. Steps to reduce the possibility of identification are used at all stages. The ESS Data Archive stores your survey responses, without contact details, indefinitely. Researchers in approved research institutions may apply for access to these unpublished results for use in scientific studies.
The ESS is undertaken for the purpose of research and its legal basis is performance of a task in the public interest and for scientific research purposes (EU GDPR and UK GDPR art. 6(1)(e); 9(2)(j); 89(1).) All processing is for this purpose.
You have rights to:
You have these rights as long as we can identify you. Please note that as soon as details, such as your name and address, are removed, then it is unlikely that you can be identified with any certainty and therefore it will no longer be possible to delete the remaining information you have provided.
When you contact Opinion42 to exercise your rights, they might have a legal obligation to keep some of your data for other purposes for a longer period of time. For example, they may be legally obliged to keep a record of who contacted them and the response given or to keep records of any incentives provided.
Thank you for taking the time to read this information sheet. Please select the button below to go back to the home page and log in to the survey.
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