SINUS MARKT- UND SOZIALFORSCHUNG GMBH

Their core work

SINUS is a German private social and market research firm based in Heidelberg, specializing in empirical social science: public opinion surveys, qualitative focus groups, audience segmentation, and analysis of media narratives. In EU research consortia, they contribute the social science layer — measuring how populations perceive, interpret, and respond to complex phenomena such as migration, disease outbreaks, and misinformation campaigns. Their practical value lies in translating raw behavioral and attitudinal data into findings that policy-makers and public health communicators can act on. They are best understood as a sociological measurement firm, not a think tank: they run the fieldwork and data collection that other consortium partners use for modelling and intervention design.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

SINUS entered H2020 in 2019 focused on migration perceptions and narrative dynamics — a classic market-research application of public opinion methodology to a political and social policy question. By 2020, their focus had shifted sharply toward pandemic information dynamics: misinformation, risk communication, crisis management, and health vulnerability — a broader and more urgent applied research agenda. The keyword expansion from four narrow migration terms to over ten terms spanning epidemiology, journalism, virology, and gender studies suggests that COVINFORM pulled them into a much wider interdisciplinary space than PERCEPTIONS did.

SINUS is moving from migration-focused perception research toward broader crisis communication and health information dynamics, positioning them as a social research partner for any consortium dealing with how the public understands and responds to societal threats.

How they like to work

SINUS participates exclusively as a consortium partner and has never held a coordinator role across their H2020 history. Despite only two projects, they have engaged with 35 unique partners across 19 countries — an unusually wide network footprint — suggesting they are brought in as a specialist social research node into large, multidisciplinary consortia rather than driving project agendas themselves. This pattern fits their profile: a niche methodological contributor that large academic and policy consortia recruit for survey design, fieldwork, and public perception analysis.

With 35 unique consortium partners across 19 countries from just two projects, SINUS has a disproportionately broad European network relative to their project volume, indicating participation in large, geographically diverse research consortia. Their partnerships likely span academic institutions, public health agencies, and social policy organizations across Western and Eastern Europe.

What sets them apart

SINUS brings something most academic partners in social science consortia cannot: decades of commercial survey and segmentation experience applied to research-grade problems. Their SINUS-Milieus methodology — a well-established audience segmentation framework used widely in German-speaking markets — gives them a distinct empirical toolkit for characterizing population subgroups that pure academic sociologists rarely possess. For consortia needing credible, fieldwork-backed public perception data rather than desk-based literature reviews, SINUS fills a gap that university partners typically leave open.

Highlights from their portfolio

• COVINFORM
  Their largest project by EC funding (EUR 377,588), spanning an unusually broad disciplinary range — virology, epidemiology, economics, journalism, gender studies — making it the clearest demonstration of SINUS operating as a social science integrator in a major health research consortium.
• PERCEPTIONS
  Demonstrates SINUS's core identity as a perception and narrative research firm, applied to the politically sensitive topic of how European narratives shape migration behavior and public attitudes.