The NEPS—an interdisciplinary network of research institutes, research groups, and individual scientists—pulls together the expertise of about 220 scientists from more than 30 research sites across Germany. By integrating theoretical and methodological approaches from the fields of pedagogy, psychology, sociology, and economics, the NEPS is building up a unique database for the investigation of educational careers in Germany. With more than 60,000 frequently tested and interviewed subjects of different ages—from birth to the educational and employment stages all the way through the postemployment phase—as well as 40,000 additionally surveyed individuals from the subjects’ social surroundings, NEPS opens up substantive possibilities for analysis in the context of educational research.
The design of NEPS enables mid- and long-term contributions towards answering the following key questions in educational research:
- How do competencies develop over the life course?
- How do competencies influence decision-making processes at various critical transitions in educational careers (and vice versa)?
- How and to what extent are competencies influenced by learning opportunities in the family, in the peer group, and in the learning environments of Kindergarten, school, higher education, vocational training, and further education?
- What competencies are decisive for obtaining educational qualifications, which for lifelong learning and which for a successful personal and social life?
NEPS data are made available free of charge to researchers aiming to answer scientific questions. Since the first data release in 2011, more than 2,000 scientists from 28 nations are already using NEPS data (as of January 2019).
Apart from the concept and the implementation of the National Educational Panel Study and a number of smaller third-party funded projects for analyzing NEPS data, the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories carries out the projects “BildungsLandschaft Oberfranken (BiLO)” and “Refugees in the German Educational System (ReGES)”. At the end of 2016, the cooperation project “Inklusion in der Sekundarstufe I in Deutschland (INSIDE)” followed.
