Keywords: Web-first panel, input harmonised, cross-national

Many grand challenges require a cross-national perspective to be fully understood, such as climate change, health, immigration and others. Many of these social and economic phenomena now transcend national borders, requiring collaborative solutions to address them among multiple nations. In addition, variation across different countries provides unique opportunities to study individuals’ behaviour and attitudes within different political, institutional and cultural contexts.

There are already several established web panels (e.g. NatCen panel in GB, Life in Australia Panel, KAMOS panel in South Korea, AmeriSpeak panel) but these are designed for national use. Meanwhile the European Social Survey has been developing the world’s first, input harmonised, cross-national ‘web-first’ panel (CRONOS) to complement the main ESS, and has successfully included 12 European countries thus far (Bottoni and Fitzgerald, 2021).

CRONOS is however currently confined to a single continent. The ESS team are now investigating the possibility of adding countries outside of Europe to the panel in future. The aim of an ‘intercontinental CRONOS’ panel will be to provide infrastructure that facilitates comparison between Europeans and those in other developed countries outside Europe. Initially it is being investigated if Australia, Korea and the USA could be added. However, the team are also seeking to identify and engage other potential countries that could be part of a larger panel in future. The scoping covers a wide range of considerations related to the survey life cycle, as well as organisational, governance and funding issues.

Adding countries outside of Europe would provide a unique resource in the form of an academically led, probability based, input harmonised cross-national general social survey, including countries across multiple continents. Such a resource has the potential to provide data faster than current international survey programmes allow and facilitate longitudinal data collection at the cross-national level which is rather rare.

In this paper the authors will outline the challenges and opportunities from expanding the panel beyond Europe focusing on the main methodological and organisational challenges.