FAQs

What is FReDA?

FReDA – The German Family Demography Panel is a study that collects and provides survey data on family life and the population in Germany.

The topics encompass:

• Families and private living arrangements
• Couples' relationships and division of tasks in the partnership
• Desires for children and family planning
• Parenthood and parent-child relationships
• Intergenerational relationships

FReDA makes the collected data available to the scientific community free of charge. The foundation laid with these data enables long-term research about a variety of questions on family and private lifestyles and reliable policy advice on relevant social issues. For this purpose, a longitudinal survey (panel) is conducted, i.e. a regularly repeated survey of the same persons over many years.

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Who is responsible for the study?

FReDA is a cooperative project. The study is being conducted by a consortium consisting of the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the University of Cologne (representing the predecessor study pairfam – The German Family Panel).

Responsible for the project management of FReDA are:

• Prof. Dr. C. Katharina Spieß, Federal Institute for Population Research
• Prof. Dr. Martin Bujard, Federal Institute for Population Research
• Prof. Dr. Christof Wolf, GESIS Leibniz Institue for the Social Sciences
• PD Dr. Tobias Gummer, GESIS Leibniz Institue for the Social Sciences
• Prof. Dr. Karsten Hank, University of Cologne
• Prof. Dr. Franz J. Neyer, Friedrich Schiller University Jena

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Who funds the study?

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is financing FReDA with initial funding from January 2020 to December 2024.

Following a positive evaluation, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community (BMI) will take over the funding of FReDA beginning in 2025, thereby securing the study for the long term.

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Who is surveyed?

FReDA focuses primarily on the phase of life in which people are faced with relationship building and decisions to start a family. Therefore, people between the ages of 18 and 49 who live in Germany are surveyed. These people are regularly re-surveyed in subsequent years until they have passed the age of 55. Every three years, additional samples are drawn to replace those who drop out of the study due to age or other reasons.

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When and how often is the survey conducted?

The first recruitment survey took place from April to June 2021. After that, two more partial surveys will be conducted in summer and late autumn 2021. From 2022 onwards, participants will be surveyed again in spring and autumn.

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How is the survey conducted?

The respondents are asked to complete an online questionnaire on their own. Alternatively, paper questionnaires sent by post for self-completion are used in addition to the online interviews.

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Who conducts the surveys?

From 2022 GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences will organize the implementation of all self-administered surveys and take over all tasks along the survey process for FReDA. This includes the programming of the questionnaires, the testing of the instruments used, the operational implementation of the surveys, the monitoring and the care and support of the panel participants. The team in Mannheim also creates the methodological standards for the samples.

With more than 320 employees, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences is the largest infrastructure facility for the social sciences in Europe and has many years of experience with renowned survey programs. The survey methodology expertise at GESIS ensures that the methodological standards of FReDA correspond to the current state of knowledge and are continuously developed. This ensures the quality of the surveys and their connectivity.

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How anonymous are the FReDA data?

The data privacy regulated in the European General Data Protection Regulation is of course complied with. All institutions that have address data are legally obliged to do so and have data protection officers who monitor this. The data are anonymised by storing the address data and the survey data of the respondents separately. All characteristics from the survey data that could identify individual persons are deleted. Only anonymised survey data are made available for research purposes.

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Who receives the FReDA data

The survey data are made available to researchers working at universities, higher education institutions and non-university research institutions. They receive the data on request from the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences (DAS). Interested users must contractually guarantee that they will use the data exclusively for research purposes.

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How can I, a researcher, evaluate the various samples?

The data from the FReDA survey provide researchers with several analysis potentials. For example, it is possible to work only with the FReDA sample or only with the pairfam sample. It is also possible to link the FReDA and pairfam data. For example, the data of corresponding birth cohorts from the FReDA survey could be connected to the pairfam sample.

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How do I cite FReDA as a researcher?

The correct bibliographic identification of the use of data from the Family Demographic Panel FReDA is of great importance for the research community and for the study, whose scientific value is measured, among other things, by these references. We therefore ask you to observe these citation rules in your publications: Refer to the study and the data version used (currently release 3.0.0) at an appropriate place in the text by using the following (or similar) wording:

This study uses data from the FReDA Panel, data release v.3.0.0 (DOI: 10.4232/1.14080 | 10.4232/1.14065 | 10.4232/1.13745), Bujard et al. (2023). A detailed description of the FReDA panel can be found in Schneider et al. (2021).

List the relevant references in the bibliography:

Bujard, M., Gummer, T., Hank, K., Neyer, F. J., Pollak, R., Schneider, N. F., Spieß, C. K., Wolf, C., Bauer, I., Börlin, S., Bretschi, D., Brüggemann, K., Christmann, P., Edinger, R., 7 Eigenbrodt, F., Frembs, L. C., Groß, K., Jost, C., Kunz, T., Lines, E., Lück, D., Naderi, R., Naumann, E., Nutz, T., Oehrlein, A.-S., Oellers, V., Ruckdeschel, K., Schmid, L., Schumann, A., Schumann, N., Stein, A., Thönnissen, C., Ullrich, E., von den Driesch, E., Weih, U. (2023). FReDA – The German Family Demography Panel Study (GESIS, Köln. Study No. ZA7777; Data File Version 3.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.14080).

Schneider, N. F., Bujard, M., Wolf, C., Gummer, T., Hank, K., & Neyer, F. J. (2021). Family Research and Demographic Analysis (FReDA): Evolution, Framework, Objectives, and Design of “The German Family Demography Panel Study”. Comparative Population Studies, 46. https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2021-06.

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What are "Open Modules"?

There are "Open Modules" in the FReDA questionnaires. These sections are not designed by the project leaders themselves, but by innovative suggestions from other researchers. Thus, researchers have the opportunity to introduce their own topics into the survey programme in order to pursue their own further research interests. For the open modules, regular calls and selections are made by the FReDA Scientific Advisory Board. The call is made, for example, via the FReDA website, the FReDA newsletter and the FReDA social network channels.