DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-8098-5
title: European Working Conditions Survey, 2015
title: European Working Conditions Surveys, 1991-
title: EWCS; Sixth European Survey on Working Conditions, 2015

description: &lt;p&gt;The &lt;i&gt;European Working Conditions Survey&lt;/i&gt; (EWCS) is conducted by Eurofound (the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions). Since its launch in 1990, the EWCS has provided an overview of working conditions in Europe. The main objectives of the survey are to:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;assess and quantify working conditions of both employees and the self-employed across Europe on a harmonised basis;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;analyse relationships between different aspects of working conditions;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;identify groups at risk and issues of concern as well as of progress;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;monitor trends by providing homogeneous indicators on these issues; and&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;contribute to European policy development in particular on quality of work and employment issues.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;Themes covered include employment status, working time duration and organisation, work organisation, learning and training, physical and psychosocial risk factors, health and safety, work-life balance, worker participation, earnings and financial security, as well as work and health.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;The EWCS paints a wide-ranging picture of Europe at work across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups. Its findings highlight actions for policy actors to help them address the challenges facing Europe today. The EWCS is generally conducted once every five years, although an extra wave was conducted in 2001 to cover the new acceding and candidate EU countries. The survey is based on a questionnaire which is administered face-to-face to a random sample of 'persons in employment' (i.e. employees and the self-employed), representative of the working population in each EU country. An integrated dataset is also available (see SN 7363) which combines data from the first five waves of the survey in one file.&lt;br&gt;
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Before working with the EWCS data, users are recommended to read the latest supplementary supporting documentation on the Eurofound &lt;a href="http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/surveys/european-working-conditions-surveys" title="European Working Conditions Survey" target="_blank"&gt;European Working Conditions Survey&lt;/a&gt; webpages. Further information about the series can be found there, including methodological information, technical reports and reports on translation, sampling implementation, sampling evaluation and weighting, coding, quality control, quality assurance and other publications.&lt;br&gt;
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&lt;/p&gt; The sixth EWCS interviewed nearly 44,000 workers in 35 countries. Its findings provide detailed information on a broad range of issues, including exposure to physical and psychosocial risks, work organisation, work–life balance, and health and well-being, the reconciliation of work and private life and the sustainability of work. &lt;br /&gt;
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For the 4th edition (June 2017), an updated version of the data file was deposited. Improvements in the population figures have led to a revision to the post-stratification weights of the 6th EWCS dataset, affecting the weighting variables w4, w5_EU12, w5_EU15, w5_EU27 and w5_EU28. Although Eurofound considers that this revision should only result in marginal changes in the weighted data, users are recommended to re-run analyses using the new weights in order to assess whether the change has had any impact on the outcome. The Readme file has been updated accordingly.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;