Initiated by the European Science Foundation, its main aims are: 1) to analyse public attitudes and values within Europe and to investigate how they interact with Europe´s changing institutions; 2) to improve and consolidate the methodology of cross-cultural research; 3) to disseminate survey methods and data analysis thecniques of cross-cultural studies. It is also a fundamental aim of ESS to disseminate ands make data acessible.

This projects aims at identifying and analysing typical trajectories of success, failure and dropping-out among higher education students, relating them to structural and institutional parameters, and looking for explanatory factors and best practices. The scope of the project is nationwide and it spreads through the various Portuguese higher education subsystems. The analysis is carried out at three levels: structural, institutional and biographical, using statistical sources, surveys, institutional documents and in-depth interviews. The project is included in the programme “The Promotion of Educational Success and the Fight against Dropping-Out and Failure in Higher Education” of MCTES (Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education) and is supported by FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology). The research team is formed on the basis of a consortium between CIES-ISCTE and ISFLUP, and has also the cooperation of other higher education institutions and students’ unions.

It is intended that this project should fill in certain significant lacunae in the treatment of a suject as important as that of the processes of modernization in contemporary Portuguese society.  The central objective of this project is to proceed towards a sociological analysis, strongle rooted in the theoretical field and solidly supported by empirical evidence, of the processes of reshaping of the social structures which are at present affecting Portuguese society.

The purpose of this project is the establishment of an observation and analysis implement on the two central processes which are transforming the portuguese development pattern: the recombination process of the competitive factors which is giving raise to new factors such as quality, flexibility and strategic capacity as a result of the internationalization; the production process of new forms of social exclusion.