The spatial reference is becoming increasingly important for educational research. Not only the structural offers play a relevant role, such as the distribution of early childhood care facilities, schools or further education offers, but also their perception and actual use by the people themselves.
At the same time, the amount of publicly available spatial data is steadily increasing, so that currently a large amount of geoinformation is available for the whole of Germany as well as for individual regions (including federal states, cities), which can be used as spatial context data in research. Interesting geoinformation includes the availability of public facilities (e.g., kindergartens, schools), the composition of neighborhoods, and environmental factors such as air quality, which can be found for different, sometimes small-scale territorial units such as grid cells, city districts, and communities.
The National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) in particular is a unique data source, which not only allows the investigation of individual educational processes and competence developments over time, but also enables expanded research possibilities within the various NEPS starting cohorts by enriching the individual data with spatial context data.