Ines Schäfer

Ines Schäfer is a Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Sociology within Goethe University Frankfurt am Main's Faculty of Social Sciences. She serves as a core member of the DFG-funded RISS project (Reconfiguration and Internalization of Social Structure), where she leads data management, preparation, and technical reporting for the CoRE team. Her research examines multidimensional attitude patterns across cultural and political domains in European comparative contexts.

• Bachelor of Sociology, University of Bremen (including research visit at University of Lausanne)
• Master of Sociology with focus on European societies, Freie Universität Berlin (completed March 2021)

Schäfer's research program centers on political sociology and public opinion polarization in Europe. She investigates the entanglement of key societal dimensions—economic redistribution, gender relations, immigration/cultural diversity, and European integration—to identify emerging conflict lines. Her methodological approach combines quantitative analysis of survey data with comparative European perspectives, revealing how social structures internalize political cleavages. Current work explores whether cultural issues operate as unidimensional conflicts or multidimensional patterns across European societies.

Her publication record demonstrates consistent focus on European political sociology, particularly the evolution of cultural divides, gender attitudes, and European integration debates. Recent work analyzes attitude alignment on immigration and redistribution (2025), gender's role in the new cultural divide (2024), and politicization trends in France/Germany (2023). Earlier contributions examine civil society during the pandemic (2021) and historical protest in reunified Germany (2020), establishing longitudinal expertise in European societal transformations.

No scientific awards were documented in the provided source materials.

Schäfer functions as a research coordinator within DFG-funded projects rather than as an academic advisor. She previously contributed to the WEZ project ("Wächst Europa zusammen?") from 2021-2023 before transitioning to her current RISS role in June 2023. Her technical responsibilities include managing complex datasets across multinational surveys, with recent grant activity centered on the €1.2M RISS initiative examining social structure reconfiguration.

Schäfer operates within the RISS CoRE team at Goethe University's Department of Sociology, collaborating with Prof. Daniela Grunow's research group. The RISS project represents a major institutional research infrastructure involving multiple European partners, with Schäfer specifically coordinating data workflows for the Internalization Survey component. This positions her within Frankfurt's quantitative sociology ecosystem focused on European comparative analysis.