“Familien in Deutschland” - FiD

Abstract

There are various independent studies evaluating family policy measures in Germany. So far, a systematic evaluation considering the different goals inherent to these measures was missing. The evaluation of family policy measures on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) and the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) is thus the first systematic overall study. In a feasibility study conducted for this overall evaluation in late 2008, one of the main conclusions was that “Without additional data only a limited number of policies regarding families and children can be evaluated” (authors’ translation, see Beninger et al. 2008). The available data sets were not sufficient for indepth analyses, especially regarding specific family types which might be rare in the German population, but still important as targets for the ministries’ policies. Such families are especially single parents, large families with more than two children, low-income families, and families with very young children. The main studies to evaluate family policies existing at the time were the Socio-economic Panel (SOEP, see Wagner, Frick & Schupp, 2007), and the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam, see Huinink et al., 2011). While the targeted groups are present in the SOEP (general population survey) and in pairfam (family survey), the actual case numbers for these families in these studies are far too low to provide sufficient statistical power for an evaluation of family policy measures. This was the initiation for the data collection effort “Familien in Deutschland” (short FiD, for “Families in Germany”). This project started to collect data in 2010, with the focus on single parents, low income families, large families with three or more children, and families with particularly young children, namely those born between 2007 and 2010. FiD was initially financed by the two federal ministries in charge of the overall evaluation. The funding covered three waves of data collection, spanning the years 2010-2012, which were used in various studies for the overall evaluation.1 A further wave of data collection in 2013 was funded by the Federal Ministry for Family affairs. As FiD collects longitudinal data very similar in content and structure to the SOEP data, the data collection will subsequently become part of the regular SOEP. However, it is already possible to jointly use the two data sets with sampling weights provided for this particular purpose. With the integration scheduled for 2014 (i.e. the FiD households will become part of the regular SOEP in the data collection of 2014), FiD will further strengthen the base of family research in the SOEP data. The following paper gives an overview of the FiD data - a quick look at the sample sizes and the number of conducted interviews.