Four hundred and eight early-career researchers have been awarded European Research Council grants in this year’s first completed ERC call for proposals. The highly-coveted funding will help individual scientists and scholars to build their own teams and conduct pioneering research across all disciplines. The grants, worth in total €621 million, are part of the EU’ Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020 (see https://erc.europa.eu/news/StG-recipients-2019).

Melanie Revilla, deputy director of the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM), has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant for her project  “New opportunities to enhance or extend (mobile) web survey data and get better insights” (WEB DATA OPP), and will receive a grant of 1,497,625 euros from the ERC to take advantage of the growing number of mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity to obtain a more accurate and more complete vision of reality and help key stakeholders to make better decisions.  

WEB DATA OPP will address three crucial research questions, around what Melanie Revilla calls “(mobile) web surveys)”: firstly, how to improve the quality of data from such surveys, from voice data, visual data and data collected “at the moment of truth”, that is, right after an event of interest. Secondly, if some of the survey questions can be substituted using measured data, obtained thanks to a tracking device to record online behaviour. The third issue that will be addressed by the research is if a more complete picture of reality can be obtained by combining new opportunities for measurement using (mobile) web survey data that allow answering questions that could not be dealt with until now (https://www.upf.edu/home/-/asset_publisher/1fBlrmbP2HNv/content/id/227879833/maximized#.XXJHOC77SUl).

Read more about WEB DATA OPP.