German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS)

The survey asks German nationals who are internationally mobile and aged between 20 and 70 years about their living circumstances. The purpose of the survey is to learn more about the individual consequences of migration in the life course; migration here includes both leaving Germany and returning to Germany. The consequences of migration are being analysed using four dimensions of the life course. These include employment and income, well-being and life satisfaction, relationships and family as well as extra-familial social relationships and social involvement.

The GERPS Survey offers a unique empirical database to better explain migration-related changes in the lives of internationally mobile persons:

• On average, respondents had emigrated from or returned to Germany twelve months before their interview.
• They are questioned about their current life situation and the conditions before they migrated.

Initially, the interviews are being conducted four times at regular intervals over a period of two years. The GERPS study can be interlinked with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which allows comparative analyses between the non-mobile and mobile population. The project is a collaboration between the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) and is being funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It is the result of intensive preparatory work as part of the “Internationally Mobile” pilot study, which was performed by the Federal Institute for Population Research and the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2014.

First Survey

More than 11,000 respondents participated in the first survey wave between November 2018 and February 2019. The response rate among emigrants was 28.5 per cent and 36.4 per cent among repatriates. In total, 93.1 per cent of the participants said they were willing to be surveyed again in the GERPS study.

GERPS First Wave: Survey Participation and Panel Consent

The first wave concentrates, in particular, on the living situation before migration. This involves, for instance, migration motivation, income, work and family. The published data and methods report contains a detailed documentation of the study design and the interview process of the first wave. The data are available as scientific use file (SUF) in the GESIS data archive.

The project website provides contact details, information on the course of the project and additional information, for example on the subsequent survey waves and current scientific publications.