5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Pioneering, especially socially relevant, decisions about pressing issues of today require the consideration of possible, probable and desirable social developments and target states. For decision-makers in politics and business, understanding future preferences of the population is of crucial importance for predicting actors’ behavior (e.g., consumer behavior) to develop suitable measures and make well-founded (political) decisions that ensure long-term social welfare. Moreover, this challenge increases against the background of transformative change issues which are pointedly discussed as transitions in diverse sectors and their interplay as well.

Aligning to this empirical situation, there is the methodological challenge of how to identify future preferences for prevailing as well as preferences for upcoming issues in an empirically rich and methodologically sound manner. As the elicitation of future-oriented preferences cannot, in principle, follow a forecast mode, the discussion of how to overcome the hurdle of measuring future preferences turn into an eminently important research problem.

The objectives of this session are to discuss theoretical foundations for the measurement of future-oriented preferences as well as empirical approaches for the elicitation of future-oriented preferences. The session welcomes theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions. In addition to isolated qualitative (e.g., focus group, qualitative interviews) and quantitative social science methods (e.g., discrete choice experiments, vignette studies), the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in the sense of a mixed-methods approach or with computer-assisted simulations to investigate future-oriented preferences are very welcome.