The Department of Social Monitoring and Methodology is an organisational unit of general social monitoring with its own thematic priorities. It also advances methodical innovation and serves as an integrative platform supporting research and social reporting in the other departments of the DJI. The Department is oriented along three main areas of work, which are reflected in its research and service activities. Research activities include substantial and methodical topics. Service activities include the support of other DJI research units as well as external research; furthermore, the Department is involved in consulting activities for policy and practice. The Department's three main areas of work are: indicator-based social monitoring; the methodology of social monitoring; and the development and management of the DJI's own research data centre.
Social reporting on the topics of childhood, youth and family depends upon the availability of regularly updated, reliable data in order to provide an up-to-date picture and describe changes in society as a whole. The Department of Social Monitoring and Methodology backs these requirements with its own regularly conducted surveys. Based on them, it prepares substantial reports and supports other research units of the DJI in indicator development, data collection, data management and archiving. The department’s topics of reporting relate, for example, to issues of children’s, adolescents’ and families’ every-day life, conditions in and interactions with proximal and distal contexts, social embeddedness and relationships, as well as education in and out of formal settings.
Another important focus of the Department is the evaluation of established methods of social reporting, the development of methodical innovations as well as consulting and training in the field of quantitative and qualitative empirical methods. The department evaluates methods used in surveys for example by investigating methodical artefacts, response bias, or problems regarding the representativeness of survey data. The aim is to improve data scope and precision in order to increase their potential to allow for more reliable insight into the situation of children, adolescents and families in Germany. The Department finally distributes its expertise by providing an ongoing a comprehensive DJI-internal training programme.
DDP - Domain-Data fpr empirical educational research
Modern indicator-based social reporting draws on a variety of available data from different perspectives and sources. At the same time, it makes these sources of its own reporting transparent and available to others for secondary analyses. In order to guarantee this transparency the Department maintains its own research data centre. In addition, the Department collects, prepares and maintains official statistics at small area regional level. Social reporting can thus be extended to include regionalised analyses. In this way, it is possible to identify differential patterns of children’s, young people’s and families’ lives and to recognize regionally divergent mechanisms of context conditions influencing processes involved in growing up.
Head of Department
81541 Munich
