The data collected by the German Family Panel pairfam are accessible to the scientific community as scientific use file for scholarly analyses. The current release 14.2 includes the following files:

• the well-prepared and anonymized pairfam data of all 14 survey waves (incl. the DemoDiff, sample refreshment and step-up subsamples) in the standard data formats Stata and SPSS (with both English and German labels),

• all codebooks (in English and German language) and questionnaires as well as a set of overviews of the instruments, the concept paper, the data and the scales manual, the annual method reports, and several other documents.

The release of the additional pairfam COVID-19 survey, release 1.1 includes:

• the well-prepared and anonymized pairfam data of the additional online survey in the standard data formats Stata and SPSS (with both English and German labels),

• the codebook (in English and German language), an overview of all instruments in the data set, syntax files to generate scales, the pairfam Technical Paper 15, and the method report.

If you are an employee of a university or research institution and would like to request the data for your own research purposes, please proceed as follows:

• Download the order form and indicate which data you would like to order.
• Enter the requested information on the contract form, sign it, and send it (via mail, e-mail or fax) to GESIS.

The use of this data is free of charge.

Please note that the pairfam data can also be ordered for B.A/M.A. theses via the user contract.  

For this purpose, the form must be signed by the student and his/her supervisor and sent to GESIS (for details see terms of contract).

According to § 2 of the user contract, the data recipient is allowed to grant access exclusively to specifically named additional participants for the given research project at the data recipient’s institution.

As soon as the content of the research project changes, new persons are added to the research project or the data is to be used beyond the given end date of the project (possibly as part of a qualification process, such as a thesis) a new data usage agreement must be signed by the respective persons and parties to this contract.

A special pairfam Campus Use File (CUF) is available for teaching purposes - for example for sample calculations of students.

As a joint release by FReDA and pairfam, the FreDA/pairfam CUFs are reduced versions of the respective Scientific Use Files (SUFs). For data protection reasons, and to make the data more manageable, the CUFs contain only selected parts of the samples and variables of the original SUFs. As the CUFs are intended for use as practice data sets, they are not suitable for use in scientific publications. The pairfam CUF includes reduced versions of the anchor and partner data of all 14 waves as well as the reduced generated data set biopart (partnership history).

This report contains more detailed information on the pairfam CUF.

The FReDA/pairfam CUFs can be requested here. They are available free of charge after registration and login at GESIS.

The full version of pairfam COVID-19 data may be used for  teaching purposes as well as B.A./M.A. theses. Due to data privacy issues, however, students may then not receive the regular pairfam data as well. In addition, every student has to sign the user contract which needs to be sent to GESIS. If the COVID-19 data need to be combined with the regular pairfam data for teaching purposes, a 50% teaching version of both data sets has to be used. For further information on this topic, please contact the pairfam user support.

The FDZ pairfam has been accredited by the German Data Forum RatSWD.

Information Complaints Office of the RatSWD:

Since July 2016, the RatSWD has established a complaints office. Via a contact form on the homepage of the RatSWD, you have the possibility to address unresolved problems with the use of the data of the FDZ, which you could not settle in an exchange with the responsible contact person at the FDZ, to the RatSWD.

The contact form as well as details about the responsibility and the procedure can be found on the website of the RatSWD: https://www.konsortswd.de/en/services/research/complaints-office/.