ESS is an attitude and behavioural survey that has been undertaken three times in more than 30 European countries, including Sweden. Two to three thousand individuals per country are interviewed about their attitudes towards, for example, immigration, democracy, equality, media and medicine use, participation in the civil society, trust, health, networks and psychological predispositions. The importance of understanding people’s attitudes, values and behaviour has become increasingly important in order to be able to understand contemporary society in a time of political and societal change. ESS has three overarching scientific goals. First, to enable comparison of key indicators within and across countries in a valid way combined with the examination of current attitudes and preferences. The aim is to produce the objectively best survey data combined with a never before seen content multiplicity. Second, to be able to measure changes in social phenomena. The majority of the questions are therefore repeated in every round of ESS. The third goal is to create sustainable social indicators that can be used to describe the state of things across time and countries. Indicators that deal with, for example, equality, crime and happiness are constructed to compliment established economic measures like GDP. ESS is an altruistic project in that data is free for everyone to use without cost. Moreover, ESS provides via NESSTAR the possibility to make calculations and simulations directly on the web without having to download the dataset