Dynamic Surveys for Dynamic Life Courses
Background
The collection of life course data has become an important field of quantitative social research in recent decades. Such retrospectively collected, biographical data enable researchers to consider the occurrence of events as well as their duration, sequence, and timing, and to focus on longer sequences in order to pursue a variety of research questions.
To advance the development and evaluation of innovative data collection tools, DSDLC is funded under the DFG's infrastructure programme ‘SPP 2431 New Data Spaces’.
Objective
The objective of this project is twofold: firstly, to develop an innovative survey instrument and secondly, to investigate its potential capabilities, limitations and effects on data quality, survey load and response rates. To this end, the survey instrument will be evaluated through an experiment involving two different samples with two treatment and one control group each.
The results and applications from this project can offer a significant contribution to survey methodology within the area of life history data and building upon preliminary efforts in this research area.
Approach
The project is organized into four work packages:
- WP1: Development of the survey instrument
- WP2: Implementation of the survey experiments
- WP3: Data preparation, analyses, and publication of results
- WP4: Documentation and publication of research data
Data collection
DSDLC mainly uses quantitative data collected in the survey experiments. However, cognitive interviews and eye-tracking are also used as part of the instrument development process.