About the Swedish citizen panel
The Swedish citizen panel is our main resource for collecting panel data. It is a highly effective and available infrastructure that allows researchers and organizations to direct research questions toward 60 000 active panel participants. On this page you will find information about how the citizen panel works and how you can be a part of it to contribute to research on Swedish society.
A research infrastructure since 2010
The Swedish citizen panel is a research infrastructure that aids researchers in Sweden and abroad in collecting research data. This is made possible by the thousands of Swedes that make up the panel, and their willingness to take part in digital surveys a few times each year.
The Swedish citizen panel was founded in 2010 at the Department for political science at the University of Gothenburg. At the time of the first panel wave, the Citizen panel had about 9 000 registered participants. In 2016 the panel was relocated to the SOM Institute and panel data collection became a valuable addition to the annual paperback SOM surveys.
As a research infrastructure, the Swedish citizen panel offers a unique opportunity for researchers to customize their study designs. Web panel data collection allows for conducting experiments, following individuals over time or closely examine current events. Every survey is designed in collaboration with researchers at the SOM Institute.
Recently, the citizen panel has collected data for researchers from a vast number of Swedish universities as well as Stanford University, London School of Economics, McGill University in Canada, Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona and European University Institute in Florens. Wherever you are, feel free to contact us with your specific needs.
Panel participants
The participants in the Swedish citizen panel are mostly self-recruited, meaning that they themselves has taken the initiative to join the panel. One important goal for the citizen panel is to keep things interesting for the panel participants without putting too much strain on them. In line with this, each participant will be sent a survey only a couple of times each year and we aim to include questions that are both enjoyable to answer and offer some food for thought.
If you want to be a part of our growing community of panel participants, use this page to register your e-mail. Please note that registration and the surveys themselves are conducted in Swedish.
One obvious drawback of self-recruited web panels are that the results are not necessarily representative of the population at large. The individuals signing up for web panels are often found to have higher education and political interest than your everyday citizen. In this way, the Swedish citizen panel differ from the SOM surveys, making data from panel studies less effective for generalizations about public opinion.
Occasionally, methodological techniques such as weighting results or recruiting random samples of participants are used to cater to the needs of collaborating researchers. Furthermore, the Swedish citizen panel allows for advanced studies in the field of survey methodology which you can read more about on our page for Methodological research.