Objectives and Strategy

The households of today’s families have become smaller and, at the same time, more families live together in three or even four generations than before. These developments were and are accompanied by changes in the family forms and living arrangements in which people live: people living alone, non-marital cohabitation and divorce have increased and the percentages of childless women and children born outside of marriage have risen. Against this backdrop, the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) aims to use up-to-date empirical data to provide information about fundamental demographic behaviours and processes as well as factors influencing these developments. Its focus is on relationships between children and their parents (generations) in particular and the relationships between couples (gender). The primary objective of the GGS is to enable new scientific findings about these demographic changes and provide these to policy-makers.

The GGS requests information about a variety of different aspects of life to explain individual demographic behaviours. In particular, this includes socio-economic information about the respondents, such as employment behaviour, income and education. Furthermore, the GGS also collects information about values and attitudes, generation and gender relationships, household composition and living conditions, social networks, private and public financial assistance, relocation biographies and health.

Compared with earlier demographic surveys, the GGS has three characterising features. The first is the panel design of the GGS, the second its consistent attention to gender relationships and the third its focus on generation relationships.

1. The panel design and the consistent use of foresighted questions within the GGS increases the analytical possibilities for explaining individual behaviour. Generally speaking, to examine causal correlations, information is needed about hypothetical explanatory factors at a time prior to the behaviour of a person for which an explanation is sought. The panel design enables explanations of individual behaviour between two waves of the GGS using the information about the respective persons from the previous wave.
2. One cross-sectional theme throughout all the GGS is gender relationships. The aim is to survey nationally representative samples with roughly the same number of men and women. Large parts of the data are surveyed from the perspective of intimate relationship, i.e. the respondents are asked for information about their current partner (where applicable). The objective of this complex collection of data is to examine the demographic behaviour in conjunction with the respective gender relationships.
3. The GGS also analyses relationships between the generations, also from the perspective of the elderly population. By including persons who have already completed their reproductive phase, the aim is to offer science and policy-makers new findings about the aging of the population.

In addition, international comparability is a fundamental element that determines the design of the GGS. For this purpose, mutual definitions and instructions for conducting the survey – which each participating country is expected to follow – are provided in addition to the core questionnaire. This is driven by the idea that it is only possible to gain a better understanding of demographically relevant actions by running a comparison between different countries, each of which have their own cultural and socio-political determining factors which we assume influence individual actions. The structural orientation of the GGS is also closely linked to this, which is implemented through the contextual database. This consists of aggregated data about demographic, social, legal and economic conditions in the participating countries and their regional subunits.

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