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Warsaw 2009: Presentations and short courses

National Standardization on the example of the German Demographic Standards versus International Harmonization

Session: How to facilitate in order to compare - infrastructures for data cooperation

Author:

Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik; GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany

Abstract:

The German Demographic Standards for Surveys and Polls are a joint recommendation by Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialwissenschaftlicher Institute, Arbeitskreis Deutscher Markt- und Sozialforschungsinstitute, and the Federal Statistical Office.
The initiative started in the early 1980s. All five years a revision is done, so that authors can control whether social change or new laws demand new response categories or a reformulation of a question. The next issue is announced for 2009.

The goal behind Demographic Standards: In the past each project is formulated its own questions asking about the socio-demographic and socio-economic variables. Comparison of data between projects or with census or micro census was not possible. Today the German Demographic Standards offer a basic questionnaire for those set of questions widely used by projects in social or market research are using.

The German Demographic Standards present the operationalization of the variables: gender, age, citizenship, marital status and partnership, education, occupation and occupational status, size of household, personal income and household income.

In the presentation
first, the composition of the questionnaire is explained as well as the planned revision;
second, the use of the questionnaire is explained – a researcher is not forced to use all questions or all categories of one question;
third, the benefit for using the Standards is explained;
fourth, single items like education, occupation, household and income are discussed under the aspect of harmonization for international comparison.