GUIDE – Success Factors for the Development of Well-Being in Digital Europe

Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE) will be Europe’s first comparative birth cohort study to study the success factors for the development of well-being in a digital world. A continuous survey of two cohorts (one sample of newborns and one of school-age children) up to the age of 24 will provide an important resource for interdisciplinary scientific research and the development of social policies for children, young people and families. Each Member State will provide nationally representative samples, and ex-ante harmonization of data will enable European comparative analyses.

With the increasing number of studies comparing countries, regions, and cultures across different dimensions, efforts are being made to understand how to achieve comparability in cross-national surveys. As described by Lynn et al. (2006), cross-national surveys include all types of surveys that attempt to achieve cross-national comparability, and achieving comparability can take various forms, from adjusting data after the fact to deliberately designing each step in the survey process to achieve functional equivalence.

In this presentation, we will first introduce the objectives of the European GUIDE project and its planned national implementation in Germany. We will then focus on the sampling challenges associated with researching comparability between countries in a cross-national project. We will illustrate our points using the early phases of the GUIDE project.

Speakers:
Dr. Sabine Düval works as a senior researcher for the GUIDE project at the Deutsche Jugendinstitut (DJI) and as a guest researcher at the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB). She holds a doctorate from the LMU Munich. Her work focuses on family sociology and quantitative methods of empirical research.

Dr. Gaspar Massiot is a senior researcher in applied statistics. He is working as a sampling expert for the GUIDE project at the Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), France. He holds a doctorate from ENS Rennes, France.