The Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi), which is affiliated with the University of Bamberg, promotes longitudinal studies in educational research in Germany. To achieve this aim, LIfBi runs the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) providing fundamental, transregional, and internationally significant, research-based infrastructure for empirical educational research in Bamberg. NEPS describes and analyzes the process of educational acquisition in Germany and its effects on individual educational processes and trajectories across the entire life span. In this way, NEPS is the first long-term study in Germany providing the national and international scientific community with longitudinal data on educational trajectories and competence development from early childhood to late adulthood.
NEPS is an interdisciplinary network of research institutes, research groups, and individual scientists that pulls together the expertise of about 220 scientists from more than 30 research sites across Germany.
Important work and services:
- LIfBi runs the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The NEPS collects longitudinal data that are representative of Germany on the development of competencies, educational processes, educational decisions, and returns to education in formal, nonformal, and informal contexts throughout the whole life span.
- NEPS data are made available to the national and international scientific community in the form of Scientific Use Files that can be accessed through various innovative ways using state-of-the-art technology. Interested data users are invited to attend regular user trainings.
- NEPS data provide an empirical basis for research and offer a rich potential for analysis with regard to educational research and related disciplines (e.g., demography, educational science, economics, psychology, and sociology).
- In addition to the standard documentation material for every single Scientific Use File, the NEPS Research Data Center offers a number of supplemental information and assisting tools for handling the NEPS data.
- The Research Data Center LIfBi (RDC LIfBi) is primarily responsible for the user-friendly preparation of survey and test data of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and its dissemination to the scientific community in the form of Scientific Use Files.
- Third-party funded projects by LIfBi: LIfBi continually acquires new third-party funded projects.
