Generations and Gender Survey (GGS): towards a better understanding of relationships and processes in the life course

Andres Vikat, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
Zsolt Speder, Demographic Research Institute, Budapest
Gijs Beets, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)
Francesco C. Billari, Università Bocconi
Christoph Buehler, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Aline Désesquelles, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE)
Tineke Fokkema, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)
Jan Hoem, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Alphonse MacDonald
Gerda Neyer, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Ariane Pailhe, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Antonella Pinnelli, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"
Anne Solaz, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

The Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) is one of the two pillars of the Generations and Gender Programme, a pan-European programme designed to improve understanding of demographic and social development and of the factors that influence these developments. The paper describes how the theoretical perspectives applied in the survey, the survey design and the questionnaire are related to this objective. The key features of the survey include panel design, multidisciplinarity, comparability, context-sensitivity, inter-generational and gender relationships. The survey applies the life course approach, focussing on the processes of childbearing, partnership dynamics, home leaving, and retiring. The selection of topics for data collection mainly follows the criterion of theoretically grounded relevance to explaining one or more of the mentioned processes. The paper will also discuss the ways of conducting policy-relevant analyses using data from the first panel wave only.