About surveys

Learn about the social surveys that COMPASS administers, and its associated work in data archiving.

Before we were COMPASS, many of our staff were involved in the National Primary Medical Care Survey (NatMedCa), investigating the activities of doctors and others involved in primary care. There was always a survey bent in our DNA, and in 2007 we set up the New Zealand Social Science Data Service, an online data repository using NESSTAR software to enable access to and analysis of a number of social surveys that had been conducted in New Zealand, including the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP).

COMPASS then administered the NZES in 2011, 2014, and 2017, and took over ISSP responsibility for New Zealand in 2013. We have also been contracted to run several other surveys since that time. Now, what we had in NESSTAR is held in the University of Auckland's Figshare repository, and we use the data sets in our own research methods teaching, as well as making them available to other researchers.