WIC COLLOQUIUM

Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Otto Friedrich University Bamberg

Education as a Lifelong Process: Design of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and Some Research Examples from the eduLIFE Project

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019, 11:00-12:00

Abstract

The German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) is one of the largest longitudinal studies worldwide. The NEPS aims to study the acquisition of education over the whole life course, to assess the consequences of education for later life course outcomes, and to describe and analyze central education processes and competence trajectories over the entire life span. It is organized as a network of excellence linking together the most important educational researchers from different disciplines. The NEPS is hosted by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Bamberg. The NEPS concentrates on six major dimensions of educational processes and has developed new longitudinal instruments to measure competence development, learning environments, social inequalities and educational decisions, educational processes of migrants, monetary and nonmonetary returns to education, as well as motivation and personality of individuals. Methodologically, the NEPS follows a multicohort sequence design with six parallel starting cohorts: (1) babies at the age of 6 months, (2) Kindergarten children at the age 3, (3) 5th graders, (4) 9th graders, (5) first-year college students, and (6) adults who, in most cases, had already left the educational system up to old age. In 2010, the  NEPS started with more than 60,000 target persons and about 40,000 individuals (parents, teachers, school classes, peers etc.) around these persons. It follows up individuals annually with standardized competence tests and questionnaires. Each new wave of the panel study is being made available to the scientific community as quickly as possible. The lecture will describe the design of the NEPS and give some analysis examples from the eduLIFE project.

For more information please see the attached file.