European Company Survey 2013

To ensure the high quality of the ECS 2013, Eurofound undertook strict quality assurance and control measures, and will benefit from an external quality assessment.

The ECS 2013 relied on a predefined quality assurance framework specifying the survey design and implementation steps and the quality control activities associated with them. The quality assurance framework of the ECS 2013 is a core element of Eurofound Surveys Management Guidelines and refers to the quality assurance framework of the European Statistical System (ESS)(opens in new tab)This link opens in a new tab and the criteria of relevance, accuracy, coherence, comparability, timeliness and punctuality, and accessibility, specifically adapted to the needs of the ECS.

Every step in the ECS 2013 was subject to detailed planning, monitoring and control, and aimed at real-time and post-factum documentation and evaluation. Striving towards continuous quality improvement, the recommendations outlined in the Quality Assessment Report of the ECS 2009 and Eurofound’s experience with previous surveys were also taken into consideration.

A Quality Assurance and Control Report, providing a detailed overview of the quality assurance and control measures employed during the survey, has been developed by the contractor for the ECS 2013. These measures covered sampling, translation, pre-testing and piloting, interviewer’s selection and training, fieldwork implementation, data processing and storage. The quality assurance and control measures were outlined in the technical specification of the survey and developed and employed by the fieldwork contractor through a quality control plan, aimed to ensure the high quality of the ECS 2013 cycle.

An external Quality assessment of the third European Company Survey has evaluated the survey process and its outputs against the predefined standards; it identified the survey strengths and weaknesses, and addressed recommendations and actions for improvement.

A vital element to ensure the success of a pan-European survey is the quality and comparability of the language versions used in each country. In the widest sense, translation aims to ensure the implementation of ‘equivalent’ instruments, in different lingual, cultural and institutional settings. The extensive translation procedure applied by Eurofound and its contractor reflects the importance of high quality translations.

The quest for equivalence starts at the questionnaire development stage, in which advance translation at the questionnaire development stage can already contribute to a more ‘translatable’ source questionnaire. It continues in the translation stage through procedures – such as using multiple translators with varying skills sets and providing them with extensive information and task specification, following from an explicit strategy. Finally, in the validation or assessment stage, committee assessments in an open environment have been argued to contribute to instrument equivalence, more so than the use of ‘back translation’ which was common practice in many multi-lingual surveys in the past.

For the ECS 2013, translation of the source questionnaire comprised several steps:

• prior to the pre-test the English draft questionnaire was translated into French and German with the aim of detecting difficulties when translating from English into other languages

• centralised, web-based translation system for authorisation and documentation

• two independent translations for each target language

• team-based interactive review meetings composed of translators and an adjudicator

• verification layer by Eurofound, where possible

• for languages that were used in multiple countries, multiple translations were created which were than cross-verified to produce final translations local for each country

• questions which had been used in previous rounds of the ECS were reviewed

• translations were copy edited and checked before being finalised

The ECS 2013 questionnaire was translated into 31 languages including the key minority languages of the surveyed countries. Eight of the languages were used in more than one country and adapted to the cultural context when necessary.

Based on the ECS 2013, a set of information sheets give an overview of the structural characteristics, work organisation practices, human resource management, employee participation and social dialogue in nine selected sectors of economic activity, both private (NACE B–N, R, S) and public (O, P, Q). In each information sheet, aspects of establishment characteristics in the sector are compared with the EU28 as a whole.

Private sector information sheets

Public sector information sheets