FReDA Starts the First Survey

The research project FReDA has begun to recruit participants for its survey. Since the beginning of April, around 100,000 people in Germany were contacted and invited to participate in the survey. Participation is voluntary and takes around ten minutes.

All individuals contacted were randomly selected, are between the ages of 18 and 49, and live in Germany. In total, there are around 30 million people that belong to this age group. The goal of FReDA is to find out more about these people.

The survey focuses on topics like:

• Family and private ways of life
• Couples’ relationships and division of work in the partnership
• Parenthood and parent-child relationships
• Wish to have a child and family planning
• Relationships between generations

Following the recruitment period, FReDA will collect survey data from the same participants twice a year. The participants’ responses will be anonymised and available at no cost to researchers. This makes it possible for the FReDA data to be evaluated for a variety of different research projects in Germany.

For example, it can be studied if and when women in Germany have children. And if this timing corresponds to earlier family planning. Since the participants are supposed to be surveyed twice a year, then it can be studied what consequences children have for work and relationships. When do mothers and fathers go back to work after the birth of a child, how do they change their career plans? And what impact does this have on life satisfaction? The first results should be published in 2022.

Multifaceted Analyses About Family and the Population

Every three years, the data can be linked to data from other countries as part of the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) programme, making it possible to conduct international comparative analyses. In addition, beginning in 2022, the samples from the pairfam study will continue to be surveyed by FReDA.

This enables a wide range of up-to-date analyses of the family and population in Germany. Politically-relevant results will be reported to policy makers and the general public by the project in a timely manner.

The study is a collaboration project carried out by the Federal Institute for Population Research, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the University of Cologne. The data collection institute infas – Institute for Applied Social Sciences is organising the first round of the survey.