ECS 2009 - Sampling

Sampling

The unit of enquiry for the survey was the establishment (in the case of multi-site enterprises the local unit). Only the establishments with 10 or more employees were included in the survey. The establishments which were active in agriculture or fishing, private households and the extraterritorial organisations were excluded. The survey covers organisations from both the private and public sectors. The survey universe comprises some 3.2 million establishments, with about 145 million employees in the 30 countries under consideration.

The sampling for the ECS was done on the basis of a matrix, where the universe in each country was divided into 10 cells defined by five size classes and two main sectors of activity – the ‘industries’ sector and the ‘services’ sector. The targets for the sampling matrix were set in such a way so that each cell had a sufficiently high number of net interviews. Larger establishments were therefore deliberately overrepresented in the net sample. A weighting procedure was then applied to correct this disproportionate sample structure.
The table below gives an overview of the number of establishments and the number of management and ER interviews per country.

Source: European Company Survey 2009 - Overview, Eurofound (2010)

The management interviews were carried out in 27,160 establishments from the total of 3.2 million establishments. The number of management interviews per country ranges from almost 350 in Malta to about 1,500 interviews in the largest countries. If possible, an employee representative (ER) was interviewed in addition to the management interview. The number of ER interviews with ER is considerably lower than the number of management interviews as not all companies have an official employee representative body (roughly only half of them) and not all ERs were willing to participate in the survey. Where an employee representative body exists within the establishment, the response rate is approximately 50%.