FReDA - The German Family Demography Panel Study

The aim of the project is to provide research on family and population in Germany with a representative, reliable and high-quality database and to secure this database in the long term. The focus is on biannual surveys of women and men aged between 18 and 55. In addition to these people selected as representative for the sample, also their partners are interviewed. The questionnaires address all facets of family life as well as other related areas of life. They also include “open modules” for which external researchers can submit questions.

The FReDA research group at the BiB coordinates cooperation with the FReDA partner institutes, the FReDA advisory board and the consortium of the “Generations and Gender Programme” (GGP). It is also responsible for the ongoing further development and redevelopment of questionnaires for the project. Furthermore, a link with official data is envisaged, including district-specific macro data and other geo-referenced data. In addition, the research group documents the survey programme and its data for data users, social scientists, journalists and other interested parties. And it promptly reports current core findings of political relevance to policymakers.

FReDA started in January 2020 and is financed by start-up funding from the BMBF until December 2024. From 2025, the project is to be stabilised by the BMI by increasing the BiB's research budget so that FReDA can be continued as a self-financed project. FReDA is being carried out by BiB in cooperation with GESIS in Mannheim and the University of Cologne (as a representative of the pairfam consortium).

For the recruitment survey in the first wave of FReDA, a sample of the 18- to 49-year-old resident population in Germany was drawn from the residents' registration offices in 2020. The gross sample comprised 108,256 people. Of these, 37,417 took part in the recruitment survey in spring 2021. 26,725 people gave their consent to be interviewed again. In the subsequent repeat surveys, around 20,000 interviews were conducted with the “anchor persons” recruited in this way. From 2022, this number was increased by more than 4,000 respondents from the pairfam sample. Refresher samples are drawn every four years. Including partners, around 30,000 people are surveyed in each sub-wave. The original target of realising at least 10,000 complete interviews in the first year of the survey was clearly exceeded.

The survey is predominantly realised through self-administered online interviews. People who do not want to or cannot complete the questionnaire online are offered paper questionnaires sent by post as an alternative. The survey instrument was originally designed to take around 60 minutes to complete. However, in order to reduce interview break-offs and panel attrition, it is divided into an approximately half-hour spring survey and an equally long autumn survey. Both sub-waves complement each other and together represent one survey wave.