DOI: 10.3886/icpsr36242.v1
title: Eurobarometer 81.3: The Environment and the European Area of Skills and Qualifications, April-May 2014
title: Version 1

description: The Eurobarometer series is a unique cross-national and cross-temporal survey program conducted on behalf of the European Commission. These surveys regularly monitor public opinion in the European Union (EU) member countries and consist of standard modules and special topic modules. The standard modules address attitudes towards European unification, institutions and policies, measurements for general socio-political orientations, as well as respondent and household demographics. The special topic modules address such topics as agriculture, education, natural environment and resources, public health, public safety and crime, and science and technology.
Eurobarometer 81.3 covered the following special topics: (1) Attitudes of European Citizens Towards the Environment and (2) Skills and Qualifications in the EU. Respondents' opinions were collected regarding their concern about environmental issues such as protection of natural resources, biodiversity, and pollution; their level of knowledge of these issues; and if they trusted various agencies such as the local government, trade unions, or consumer associations to provide reliable information about environmental issues. Respondents were also questioned about how environmental, social, and economic factors affected their quality of life, which group or groups were most responsible for addressing environmental issues, and which solutions they felt would have the strongest impact.
Additional questions were asked regarding which skills were most important to achieve success in the workforce, where such skills could best be obtained, and the ease of accessing information on how to pursue educational opportunities to acquire these skills.
Respondents were also asked about their socioeconomic position in society, whether their voice was being heard in the electoral system, and their opinions on if their home country and the European Union were generally going in the right or wrong direction.

Demographic and other background information collected includes age, gender, nationality, marital status, occupation, age when stopped full-time education, household composition, ownership of a fixed or mobile telephone and other goods, difficulties in paying bills, level in society, and Internet use. In addition, country-specific data includes type and size of locality, region of residence, and language of interview (select countries).
description: For each sample (country or lower level region) through the post-stratification weighting procedure a comparison is carried out between the sample composition and a proper universe description. The universe description is made available by the National Survey Research Institutes and/or by EUROSTAT. On this basis a national weighting procedure, using marginal and intercellular weighting, is applied. As such in all countries, minimum sex, age, region NUTS II (basic regions as defined by the EUROSTAT nomenclature of territorial units for statistics), and size of locality are introduced in the iteration procedure. This post-stratification weighting is also referred to as redressement or non-response weighting. A design weight which would adjust for unequal selection probabilities (depending on the household size) is not made available. Please refer to the Weighting documentation,as well as ZACAT, for additional weighting information.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of 
				disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major 
				statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to 
				these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
			   		Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
					
						DS1: Dataset
description: Eurobarometer Survey Series
description: computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI), face-to-face interview
					The original data collection was carried out by TNS Opinion and Social on request of the European commission between April 23 - May 12, 2014. In some areas, fieldwork dates may vary slightly from this timeframe.Module QA mainly replicates questions on "Environment" (QA1 to QA18) asked in the context of Eurobarometer 75.2 (ICPSR 34265).
										The category scheme for the country specific protocol variable P6 (SIZE OF COMMUNITY) has changed considerably, except for Germany. All other countries have been harmonized among each other to include the following three categories: Rural area, Towns and suburbs/Small urban area, and Cities/Large urban areas.
The category scheme for the country specific protocol variable P7 (REGION) has changed for some countries, in particular introducing NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) categories for Ireland, Estonia and Croatia.
The data for protocol variables P8 (postal code), P9 (sample point number) and P10 (interviewer number) have not been made available.
description: In all, Eurobarometer 81.3 interviewed 27,998 citizens in the 28 countries of the European Union after the 2013 enlargement with the accession of Croatia in July. All respondents have the respective nationalities of the 28 European Union Member States, reside in each of the Member States, and are aged 15 and over. Separate samples are drawn for Great Britain and Northern Ireland as well as for East and West Germany.
				   		Smallest Geographic Unit: country
description: A multi-stage, random (probability) sampling design was used for this Eurobarometer. In the first stage, primary sampling units (PSU) were selected from each of the administrative regionals units in every country (Statistical Office of the European Community, EUROSTAT NUTS 2 or equivalent). PSU selection was systematic with probability proportional to population size, from sampling frames stratified by the degree of urbanization. In the next stage, a cluster of starting addresses was selected from each sampled PSU, at random. Further addresses were chosen systematically using standard random route procedures as every Nth address from the initial address. In each household, a respondent was drawn, at random, following the closest birthday rule. No more than one interview was conducted in each household.
Please refer to the Technical Specifications section within the Questionnaire, as well as ZACAT, for additional sampling information.