Content and Objectives

Within the Family Demographic Panel (FReDA), the BiB is responsible in particular for coordination with the FReDA partner institutes, the FReDA Council, the consortium of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), policymakers and data users. Research Group 1.3 "FReDA - The Family Demographic Panel" is responsible for the ongoing development of questionnaires for FReDA and aims to link them with official data, including among others small-scale macro data and geo-referential data. It documents the survey programme for data users and for interested parties from science, the media, politics and the public, in particular on a website and in documentation, which is made available free of charge online as a printed version and as PDF documents. It also promptly reports current core findings of political relevance to politicians and the public.

FReDA is a panel with semi-annual repeat surveys, with the spring and autumn surveys asking different, complementary questions and each representing a "wave". A representative sample of the German resident population aged 18 to 49 (at the time of sampling) and their partners are surveyed. Since 2022, the sample of the "Relationship and Family Panel" (pairfam) has also been integrated into FReDA. A total of around 30,000 people are surveyed in each (partial) wave. FReDA collects data on various family demographic topics with interdisciplinary references. Every three years, the FReDA questionnaire corresponds to the German "Generations and Gender Survey (GGS)", which is conducted in numerous countries and whose data is internationally comparable. In order to make the content of the FReDA surveys as relevant and innovative as possible, researchers are invited each year to submit suggestions for additional questions. A selection is made from the proposals submitted and integrated into the questionnaire in the form of "open modules". The data from FReDA is made available to the scientific community free of charge via the data archive of the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS).

The project began in 2020 by preparing the first survey and drawing a representative sample. The first surveys were conducted in 2021 - mainly online. In 2022, the first open modules were surveyed, the first data published and the first analyses carried out. This was followed in 2023 by the surveys of the third wave, the data release of the complete first wave and the first user conference. The surveys for the fourth wave, the release of the second wave, two further user conferences and various information and training events are scheduled for 2024. In addition, the external evaluation of the project commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) will be finalised. Based on the evaluation results, recommendations will be made for the continuation of FReDA, with funding to be provided by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs (BMI) following a positive assessment.