New Europe Barometer VI, 2001

The <i>New Europe Barometer</i> (NEB) series, originally known as the <i>New Democracies Barometer</i> (NDB), has been conducted annually across Central and Eastern Europe since autumn 1991. The same questions are asked in each country and repeated from year to year, so trends can be analysed across a wide variety of post-Communist societies. Approximately 1,000 respondents in each country are interviewed face-to-face each year about their economic, political and social attitudes and behaviour. Data are available for separate years and also as a trend dataset (SN 5241). Further information on the NEB is available on the <a href ="http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cspp/catalog13_0.shtml" title ="CSPP Barometer Surveys">CSPP Barometer Surveys</a> web site, along with details of other survey series.<br>
The sixth <i>New Europe Barometer</i> (NEB) survey, conducted in 2001, covered the ten post-communist countries then actively negotiating entry to the European Union: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Several questions are covered in the survey. How do respondents evaluate their new regime and compare it to the past, and what are their expectations for the future? How committed are people to the rejection of undemocratic alternatives? How do respondents evaluate their national economic conditions and those of their household in terms of the past, present and future expectations? What are the priority of identities of individuals, ranging from local to European? NEB surveys ask the same questions in all countries covered. For 2001, the results were merged into a single multinational data file, with each country's responses weighted equally at 1,000. The multinational data file encourages research that considers the extent to which causes of division within society, for example education, age or economic status, operate transnationally. It is possible to assess to what extent and under what circumstances national context is an important influence on behaviour and attitudes (net of individual attributes), and to test the importance of absolute standards of living, which are measured cross-nationally by a household's material possessions, as against relative income advantage or disadvantage.<br>
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In addition to this, separate data files for all ten countries are included in the dataset. The majority of questions asked in the 2001 survey had been asked in previous surveys.<br>
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The responses from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are comparable with the <i>New Baltic Barometer</i> survey series (available from the UK Data Archive under GN 33416).<br>