DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-7363-9
title: European Working Conditions Survey Integrated Data File, 1991-2015
title: European Working Conditions Surveys, 1991-
title: EWCS

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;Users of the &lt;span style="font-style: italic;"&gt;European Working Conditions Survey Integrated Data File, 1991-2015&lt;/span&gt; are advised to consult the documentation of individual year studies. These are listed on the
&lt;a href="http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/series/?sn=200014" title="EWCS series" target="_blank"&gt;
EWCS series&lt;/a&gt; webpage.&lt;br&gt;
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&lt;b&gt;Latest Edition Information:&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For the eight edition (May 2020), a revised version of the data has been deposited with the following changes:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;The variables y15_Q81b and y15_Q81c have been corrected; while the data for 2015 were correct in the previous version of the dataset, the values for the years prior to 2015 were not. The values of y15_Q81b and y15_Q81c had been switched. This has been fixed in this update and both variables are now correct for all years.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;PSU identifiers, as well as identifiers for the strata (region and urbanisation) for the years 2010 and 2005, have been added with the following variables: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;region_2010, &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;region_2005, &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;region_2000, &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;PSU_2005, &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;PSU_2010, &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;urbanisation_2010 and &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;span lang="EN-IE"&gt;urbanisation_2005.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;i&gt;Users should also note that the variables for the strata of 2000, 2005, and 2010 do not correspond directly to the variables for the strata of 2015 (EWCS region, EWCS_urbanisation1_3) because the regions and urbanisation levels chosen as strata differ between the waves of the survey. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;