14 Years of pairfam – Résumé and Outlook

After 14 years, the 7th pairfam Interdisciplinary International Conference, which took place in Munich from May 11th to 13th, also marked the end of funding of the German Family Panel by the German Research Foundation (DFG). However, it will continue in a new form: The pairfam sample will continue to be surveyed within the framework of FReDA and is currently already in the field with survey wave 2a.

More than 120 researchers came to Munich or participated online in the hybrid conference. Prof. Dr Hans van Ess, Vice President for Research at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, began by congratulating the project’s network on its many years of successful work. Afterwards, Dr Eckard Kämper, Programme Director at the DFG for Humanities and Social Sciences and responsible for pairfam since the beginning, praised the German Family Panel as an outstanding project that has permanently changed the way family research is conducted in Germany.

Former project director Prof. Dr Johannes Huinink provided a personal review of the project's genesis and success story, which began in 2004. Initially, the DFG Priority Programme 1161 spent four years developing instruments that were tested in the three waves of the mini-panel. Then, in 2008, the pairfam panel "took off" with 12,402 realised anchor person interviews. Funding as a long-term DFG project began in 2010. The team repeatedly argued passionately and quite controversially, especially about the survey content, but in the end, compromises were always found with a view to the common goal, recalled Prof. Huinink. The success of pairfam can be measured by more than 400 publications (more than half of them in SSCI journals) and more than 2,200 data users. Prof. Huinink's presentation ended with a "big thank you" to all participants.

Lots of new insights through pairfam

In their keynote lectures, the current project leaders highlighted the substantive findings that pairfam has contributed over the years in the core areas of partnership, fertility, parenting and child well-being, intergenerational relationships and survey methods. The multi-actor design, a special feature of pairfam, allowed, for example, statements about the relationship between personality traits of both partners and partnership satisfaction as well as a three-generation perspective in the study of intergenerational transmission processes. The assessment of child well-being from both parent and child perspectives showed, for example, that mothers with higher work-family conflict use stricter parenting methods, which partly explains the association with problematic child behaviour. Exploration of new developments and concepts, such as "co-parenting" and "regretting parenthood," also became possible with the pairfam data. The additional pairfam COVID-19 study provided data on subjective changes in family climate during the pandemic. From a survey methodology perspective, the pairfam project provided insights into the advantages of graphical event history calendars and the input of information from the previous year for panel studies, among other things.

Prof. Dr Bernhard Nauck, former Principle Investigator from TU Chemnitz, highlighted the importance and challenges of international comparative family research in his lecture and presented findings on different transition patterns and family constellations in young adulthood. The pairfam team made a central contribution to family research through its various harmonization projects, which enabled comparisons with, among others, China, Japan, the United States or European countries, as Prof. Nauck made clear.

Sample to be continued in FReDA

The 26 substantive presentations and 9 posters during the 3 days of the conference also presented new analyses on the core areas of the pairfam project and were mostly based on analyses of the pairfam data. During the "Invited Symposium," researchers from Ireland and Finland presented findings on social relationships, well-being and "school burnout" among children and adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. FReDA colleagues Annika Stein, Emely Ullrich and Almut Schumann presented findings on economic deprivation and parenting behaviours, the impact of parental separation in adulthood, and effects of survey mode in assessing partnership satisfaction. PD Dr Martin Bujard provided an outlook on the future of the pairfam sample and introduced FReDA.

Since a panel study offers additional analysis potential with each wave, the interest in the pairfam data will certainly continue to increase. In mid-June, another survey wave will already be available with the release 13.0. The pairfam newsletter and the pairfam-website will provide information about the exact release date.

Of course, you will also find current information about pairfam, how pairfam is integrated into FReDA’s survey design, and future access to the pairfam data on our Website freda-panel.de.