The Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Bamberg studies educational processes from birth to late adulthood. To promote longitudinal educational research in Germany, LIfBi provides fundamental, nationally and internationally significant, research-based infrastructures for empirical educational research.
At the heart 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 excellence network. Other large-scale projects for which LIfBi collects 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. This work is grounded in the institute’s own research and development activities, in particular the advanced development of instruments and methods for longitudinal educational studies, which also benefit other research projects.
Important work and services:
- Through the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), longitudinal data on competence development, educational processes, decisions, and returns in formal, non-formal, and informal contexts are collected representatively for Germany across the entire life span. In seven starting cohorts, more than 70,000 participants are being followed – from early childhood to late adulthood. In addition, about 50,000 individuals from their environments, such as parents and educational professionals, are surveyed.
- The Research Data Center at LIfBi (FDZ-LIfBi) processes the survey data of LIfBi’s large-scale projects in a user-friendly way and provides them free of charge as Scientific Use Files for scientific analyses. The offering includes the extensive NEPS data, supplemented by special NEPS data products, as well as longitudinal data from the refugee study ReGES, the TAEPS study on teachers in adult and continuing education, the GUS study on students’ health behavior, and other unique datasets, such as the regional study BiLO. The full range of LIfBi research data and associated services is available via the FDZ-LIfBi Data and Service Portal.
- The DFG Priority Program on Research Infrastructure “New Data Spaces for the Social Sciences” (SPP 2431) aims to develop technical and methodological solutions to ensure the future viability of panel surveys, to enrich them with data from other sources, and thereby further pave the way for social science research on key societal challenges. “New Data Spaces” is coordinated and managed by the overarching project CONNECT, which is based at LIfBi. In addition, SPP 2431 includes a “Research Infrastructure and Innovation Lab” (ENTAILab), which consists of four measures in total. Measure 4, “Results for Future Data Spaces and Open Science,” as well as two projects within the Priority Program, are also located at LIfBi.
