05.11.2021BiB’s Important “Population Studies” for Politics and Society

New Director takes the helm of BiB: Prof. Dr. C. Katharina Spieß. Source: Peter-Paul Weiler/BiB

On October 1, 2021, Prof. Dr. C. Katharina Spieß took over as Director of BiB. With her move to Wiesbaden, she was also appointed as a Professor in Population Economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Previously, the economist headed the Education and Family Department at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin. She was also Professor of Education and Family Economics at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests focus primarily on educational and family research issues. Together with colleagues, she has recently published studies in which she examines, against the background of the Corona pandemic, how women and men feel about the employment of mothers or how the life satisfaction of parents has developed during the pandemic. In this interview, she talks about her move to BiB and provides an outlook on the future direction of the institute.

Prof. Dr. Spieß, what made you decide to move to BiB?

The short answer is: Because I had already been working on population research topics since my studies in Mannheim and all the years thereafter, even if the focus was primarily on population economics. The more detailed answer is that, as an economist, I work at the intersection between sociology, psychology, geography, and education sciences, and I exchange ideas with many colleagues in these fields and we carry out research projects together. BiB is attractive to me for many reasons: For years, it has been working on topics that overlap with my research. In addition, it is located at the interface between research and policy advice – a balancing act that I have been working on for many years. Moreover, the BiB team is very dynamic and has shown in recent years how an institute can evolve. Furthermore, after more than 20 years at DIW in Berlin and with now very independent children, I am looking forward to new challenges – ones that will allow me to bring my previous experience in research, political consulting, and public relations to the management of a research institute.

Where do you see thematic overlaps between your previous research work with the research topics at BiB?

It is undisputed that there is a great deal of overlap in the area of family research. In recent years, I have also been increasingly involved with questions of migration and immigration to Germany, another focus at BiB. Although it has been a while, at the beginning of my academic career I did intensive research on issues of aging. For many years, I was also able to learn how survey research works and is managed at the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at DIW. So, you can see that I can connect well with the many topics researched at BiB – even if there are areas where I will be breaking new ground, but which I am already really looking forward to. As the BiB researchers on aging know all too well, successful aging is about constantly learning new things– and that applies equally to me as the new BiB director.

As a member of the Board of Trustees, you provided scientific support for the development of BiB. How do you think the external perception of the institute has changed in recent years?

I have been a member of the BiB's Board of Trustees since 2013 and have thus been able to follow very closely how the institute has developed into a more visible player in the German and European research landscape in recent years. By attracting many young researchers to BiB, some of whom bring international experience with them, the institute has become very rejuvenated in terms of external perception. A more important aspect is that this has brought new research expertise to the institute, which, in combination with the existing long-standing expertise, makes the institute compatible with current population research – which is as diverse as BiB. It is important for the public’s perception that BiB is not seen as a pure research institute for demography, but rather – if we look at it internationally – it is about population studies, a field of social science that provides important analyses and answers for many central questions of the future. I see the central task of BiB, which we will continue to work on in the future, as being to conduct population studies at a high scientific level and to pass on the findings to politicians and society in a way that is appropriate for the target group.

Where do you see potential for further scientific development or thematic changes?

The three research areas at BiB cover central population research topics.

With large-scale projects such as FReDA, TransFAR or the NAKO Health Study, which is based at BiB, the institute makes an important contribution to the data infrastructure in Germany and beyond. However, the importance of education, for example, for demographic events in the life course, has so far only been considered sporadically at BiB. As an education researcher, I would like to place a stronger emphasis on this. The focus will be on the role of education for fertility, migration, mobility, aging processes and mortality. Many correlative analyses are available, but I would like to focus more on the causal effects that we can measure in order to give policymakers empirically based indications of how demographic change can be countered by investing in education. It is a matter of looking inside the "black box" and increasingly asking about the mechanisms of impact chains. We already know quite a bit about this, but there are still many areas that have not been or not yet sufficiently researched.
One of my long-standing research topics, early education and care, is of particular importance from a population research perspective. This involves, for example, investments in this area that help to identify and develop educational potential at a very early age. As an aging society, we need to increase our efforts to invest in our human capital in such a way that it exploits targeted potential.

In addition to this focus, it is very important to me to further deepen cooperation between the various research areas: How, for example, do families with a refugee or migration background organise the domestic division of labour between the sexes? What are the effects of grandparent care on the next generations and what mechanisms underlie these effects?

I would also like to further increase the international visibility of the BiB – from an international perspective, BiB has so much to offer that we will enter into an even more intensive exchange with international colleagues. Ultimately, this will also help us to improve our policy advice, which should not be limited to the German context.

But for now, I will only share any further ideas with the BiB team – let me surprise you!