The Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Bamberg investigates educational processes from birth through to advanced adulthood. In order to promote longitudinal educational research in Germany, LIfBi provides fundamental, research-based infrastructures of supra-regional and international relevance for empirical educational research.
At the core of the institute is Germany’s largest long-term educational study, the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), which is based at LIfBi and brings together the expertise of a nationwide, interdisciplinary network of excellence. Further large-scale projects for which LIfBi collects and/or provides longitudinal data include, in addition to the refugee studies ReGES and BildungswegeFlucht, the inclusion study INSIDE as well as the monitoring study Data Literacy. These activities are grounded in the institute’s own research and development work, in particular in the well-established development of instruments and methods for longitudinal educational studies, from which other research projects also benefit.
Important work and services:
- Through the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), longitudinal data representative of Germany are collected on competence development, educational processes, educational decisions, and educational returns in formal, non-formal, and informal contexts across the entire life course. A total of more than 70,000 participants are followed in seven starting cohorts—from early childhood to advanced adulthood. In addition, around 50,000 individuals from participants’ social environments, such as parents and educational professionals, are surveyed.
- The Research Data Center of LIfBi (FDZ-LIfBi) prepares the survey data from LIfBi’s large-scale projects in a user-friendly manner and provides them free of charge as Scientific Use Files for academic analysis. The data offering includes the extensive NEPS datasets, complemented by specialized NEPS data products, the longitudinal data from the refugee study ReGES, the TAEPS study on instructors in adult and continuing education, the GUS study on students’ health behavior, as well as other unique datasets, such as the regional study BiLO. The full range of LIfBi research data and related services is available via the FDZ-LIfBi data and service portal.
- The DFG Priority Programme “New Data Spaces for the Social Sciences” (SPP 2431) aims to research and develop technical and methodological solutions to ensure the future viability of panel surveys, to enrich them with data from other sources, and thereby to further pave the way for social science research addressing key societal challenges. “New Data Spaces” is coordinated and managed by the overarching project CONNECT, which is based at LIfBi. SPP 2431 also includes a “Research Infrastructure and Innovation Lab” (ENTAILab), comprising four measures. Measure 4, “Results for Future Data Spaces and Open Science,” as well as two projects within the Priority Programme, are also based at LIfBi.
