The scientific objectives of the Technical Feasibility Study are to
develop a plan for integrating the pilot study data collected in all survey studies;
develop procedures for post-processing, unifying, amalgamating, harmonizing and distributing the data, and completing a design and 'proof of concept' for configuring it as a ‘cubed data’ structure with software permitting potential researchers and other stakeholders to access the data in a straightforward and transparent fashion; and ensuring its general quality;
guarantee the anonymity of respondents to citizen surveys;
ensure the quality of the survey sample frames and of the questionnaire translation;
make the data available to all potential users; thus validating the proposed user interface;
evaluate the technical feasibility of the creation of this database.
evaluate the technical feasibility of expanding the database by linking it to existing studies, such as prior EP Elections Studies, Eurobarometers, prior media studies and prior candidate surveys, as well as to data collected at the time of subsequent European Parliament elections; and of coordination with other relevant data collection efforts (e.g. on legislative behaviour).
After the teams produce draft questionnaires and codebooks for the pilot study, the data committee will evaluate these and make sure that the coding categories match and that translations are of a high quality. The teams will then be responsible for monitoring the fieldwork. While the fieldwork is being carried out, the data committee will develop a plan for cleaning, unifying, amalgamating and harmonizing the data so that they can be integrated into the database, ensuring anonymity of respondents. This plan should also contain proposals for creating an interface that allows easy access to the data by stakeholders.
After the five separate data sets from the pilot study are delivered, the data will be post-processed (adding instruments of analytic value such as scale scores), integrated in a database, and made available to the users. A final conference will be organized which will include ‘proof of concept’ validation sessions for the planned infrastructure viewing software. After this conference, the data committee will issue a report which, on the basis of the conference, the validation sessions, and of reports from all survey studies, will evaluate the technical feasibility of expanding the data collected in the pilot study by linking it to other −exiting− studies, such as prior European Elections Studies, Eurobarometers, prior media studies and prior candidate surveys, and to data collected in other scholarly enterprises such as legislative behaviour studies and policy studies. This report will also evaluate the technical feasibility of implementing the ‘cubed data’ viewing software and of extending the infrastructure over time with the addition of data for future EP elections.