Content and Objectives

Within the Family Demographic Panel (FReDA), the BiB is responsible in particular for overall 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 German Family Demography Panel Study” is responsible for the ongoing development of questionnaires for FReDA and aims to link them with official data, including 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, in social media and in reports, which are made available free of charge as printed versions and online as PDF documents. It also reports current core findings of political relevance to politicians and the public in a timely and proactive manner.

FReDA is a panel with bi-annual subwaves, with the spring and autumn surveys asking different, complementary questions. 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 German Family Panel" (pairfam) has also been integrated into FReDA. A total of around 30,000 people are surveyed in each (sub) 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 GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
The project began in 2020 by preparing the first survey and drawing a representative sample. The first surveys were conducted in 2021. In 2022, the first open modules were surveyed, the first data was published, initial analyses were carried out and findings were presented to politicians for the first time in the "FReDA informs" event series. The first user conference and the first "FReDA Autumn School" to train data users took place in 2023. A first refresher sample was taken in 2024.

The external evaluation of the project, scheduled by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), was also completed in 2024. Based on the evaluation results, recommendations were made for the continuation of FReDA. After five years of start-up funding from the BMBF (2020-2024), FReDA will therefore be financed from 2025 by the BiB's own research budget, which will be increased accordingly by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Home Affairs (BMI).