FORS Data Re-use Award

Are you currently working with social science data you got from FORS? Or are you planning to do so in the next few months? Then consider submitting your paper to the FORS Data Re-use Award and get the chance to win up to 1’000CHF. The FORS Data Re-use Award is given to young researchers who carry out excellent research that is based on secondary data.

Who can apply for the award?
Young researchers, notably doctoral students and postdocs can apply for the award.
Award
Up to three prices will be given.

First price: 1’000 CHF

Submission criteria

  • The manuscript must be based on data accessed via SWISSUbase.
  • The data were not produced by any of the authors.
  • The manuscript is a full paper. It can still be a work in progress but is not yet published. The author(s) plan(s) to submit it to a peer-reviewed journal.
  • Research teams can submit papers. The first author must be an early career researcher (doctoral student or postdoc).
  • The dataset is properly cited.
  • The manuscript is written in English.

The submission deadline for the 2026 edition is October 31.

Evaluation criteria

  • Innovative use of the data
  • Quality of the research design
  • Quality of the empirical analysis
  • Originality
  • Relevance/impact
  • Quality of writing and presentation
  • Career stage
  • Composition of the research team

Committee
Representatives of different units at FORS and researchers from the the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Lausanne will evaluate all the submission and discuss them.
Winner of the 2025 award

We are pleased to award the FORS Data Re-use Award 2025 to the article “What is the best way of collecting data donations?”, by Marc Asensio et al..

By providing concrete evidence on how to maximise compliance and reduce bias in data donation studies, this work makes an important contribution to survey methodology and the re-use of digital trace data in the social sciences.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2570738

As smartphones are now embedded in everyday life, the study examines how mobile and app usage data can be collected through data donation in online surveys, using information already available to participants via tools such as iOS Screen Time and Android Digital Wellbeing.

Based on a large-scale web survey experiment in Switzerland (N = 872), the authors compare different data donation methods — screenshots, video recordings, and manual data entry (“enhanced recall”) — as well as the role of incentives. The results show that manual data entry leads to substantially higher compliance rates, while also revealing differences between donors and non-donors, notably in age and digital skills.

Overall, the study provides practical guidance on how to maximise compliance and limit bias in data donation research, offering valuable insights for the re-use of digital trace data in the social sciences.

To address these questions, the authors implemented a data donation experiment within the FORS Connect panel, an academically led methodological online panel. The study was conducted in the second wave of the panel and involved 872 panellists, originally recruited from a probability-based sample of adults in French-speaking Switzerland using a push-to-web design.

Fielded between November and December 2022, the study provides rare experimental evidence on compliance, participant burden, and sample composition in data donation research, offering concrete guidance for the re-use of digital trace data in social science surveys.

Save the date
Marc Asensio will present the paper at the FORS Lunch Seminar on February 10, 2026.
All information on the FORS Lunch Seminars can be found here.

Winner of the 2024 award

We are delighted to announce that the recipient of the latest FORS Data Re-use Award:

Nathalie Vigna PhD, post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan.

For her paper: Who is ready to pay for protecting the environment? Social and spatial divides in Europe.

In her research, based on two large-scale comparative surveys from FORS, the ISSP 2020 and ESS 2016,  Nathalie Vigna analyses the relationship between spatial and social stratification and willingness to pay for environmental policies. She shows consistent differences between socioeconomic groups and types of places from 13 European countries. Based on several indicators of socioeconomic position – education, class, household income – Nathalie Vigna’s research points to the fact that the least privileged groups of society are much less willing to pay higher taxes to protect the environment or mitigate climate change. This finding is observed for all the countries studied. It is also visible when using an alternative dependent variable based on a question asking people whether they would pay higher prices to protect the environment.

Furthermore, Nathalie Vigna highlights the intersection of social and spatial inequalities: willingness to pay is highest among upper-middle-class residents of urban centers, while residents of peripheral regions display lower levels of support.

Nathalie Vigna’s research further contributes to the knowledge of environmental policy support by showing that these differences are only partially explained by the different levels of environmental concern or different beliefs about climate change across the social hierarchy. Her research has important implications for public policy, as raising awareness of climate change is not enough to make the most vulnerable people willing to contribute through personal costs. Environmental policy-makers can only seek public consensus by addressing social inequalities or providing progressive compensation.

The data underlying their research is available on SWISSUbase:
–https://www.swissubase.ch/en/catalogue/studies/13102/latest/datasets/929/1396/overview
–https://www.swissubase.ch/en/catalogue/studies/13953/latest/datasets/1232/2079/overview

The article will be published soon.

Save the date
Nathalie Vigna will present her paper at the FORS Lunch Seminar on February 4, 2025.
All information on the FORS Lunch Seminars can be found here.

Winners of the 2023 award

We are delighted to announce that the recipients of the latest FORS Data Re-use Award are:

Anna-Lena Nadler and Elif Naz Kayran, for their exceptional paper entitled “Local alien enfranchisement and external efficacy perceptions: intended and unintended effects on non-citizens and citizens”.

Examining the Swiss Household Panel data from 1999 to 2014, the authors investigate the impact of local alien enfranchisement on political influence perceptions among citizens and non-citizens. Findings indicate that inclusive enfranchisement policies heighten non-citizens’ sense of political influence without diminishing citizens’ efficacy. This highlights the potential of such policies to foster immigrant integration in diverse democracies.

We encourage you to read their paper published here.
The data underlying their research is available on SWISSUbase https://doi.org/10.48573/58nw-6a50.

Winners of the 2022 award

First prize

Rita Schmutz (LIVES, University of Lausanne)

Inequality of Educational Opportunity in Switzerland: Exploring Regional Differences and Institutional Factors

The data can be found here: https://www.swissubase.ch/de/catalogue/studies/13413/18252/overview

Second prize

Mengling Cheng (LIVES, University of Lausanne)

Evolution of the income-related gap in health with old age: Evidence from 20 countries in European and Chinese panel dataset 

The data can be found here: https://www.unil.ch/share/de/home.html

Second prize

Alessandro De Boni

Youth enfranchisement in Switzerland: an analysis from the Swiss Election Studies Selects (Master thesis)

The data can be found here: https://www.swissubase.ch/de/catalogue/studies/8862/18944/overview