About the Swedish Citizen Panel

One of Sweden's largest and oldest web panels

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 of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. At the time of the first panel wave, the panel had about 9 000 registered participants. In 2016 the panel was relocated to the SOM Institute and web panel data collection became a valuable addition to the annual paperback SOM surveys. Since then, the Swedish Citizen Panel has been expanded through both self-recruited participants and random probability recruitment. Today, the Swedish Citizen Panel has 70 000 active participants.

Approximately 75% of the panel is self-recruited. The self-recruited panelists are recruited using a various number of methods. These consist mainly of informational ads, snowball sampling, and recruitment through a voting advice application in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. The remaining 25% are recruited using a probability-based recruitment method. For the randomly recruited part of the panel, we systematically and regularly recruit new participants through the Swedish population registry, with a particular focus on hard-to-reach sociodemographic groups. The level of representativity is high in both parts of the panel, albeit that the randomly recruited panel sample is more similar to the Swedish population.

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, longitudinal data collections or closely examine current events. Every survey is designed in collaboration with researchers at the SOM Institute. Wherever you are, feel free to contact us with your specific needs.

Data collection and research collaboration

Panel studies provide a unique opportunity to follow the same individuals over time, for example to study attitudes before and after a specific event, or how habits and opinions change as people grow older, have children, or change career paths. When data are collected from the same individuals across multiple waves, they are referred to as longitudinal data.

The Swedish Citizen Panel also opens the door to more specialized studies, for instance when there are requirements for specific samples with a particular sociodemographic composition (such as gender, age, occupational group, level of education, or geographic region), or when surveys need to be distributed at a specific point in time. One might, for example, want to study opinions at several points during a crisis, such as attitudes toward vaccination at different stages of a pandemic. In such cases, longitudinal studies are particularly well suited.

Data collections in the Swedish Citizen Panel are usually carried out in four omnibus waves per year, but it is also common to distribute surveys between the omnibus waves or carry out shorter and rapid data collections to measure attitudes toward recent events (for example following the terrorist attack in Stockholm in 2017). Not all 70 000 participants receive all questions each time. Instead, samples are divided (stratified sampling) depending on the requirements of the research question, and to avoid unnecessary overburdening of participants. On the page Panel waves and technical reports, you can find an overview and information about all major data collections conducted since the panel’s launch in 2010.

If you are interested in collaborating with us for your research project, feel free to contact us or refer to the page Collect data in the Swedish Citizen Panel.