New possibilities for spatial analyses with NEPS: With additional georeferencing, it is now possible to link a wide variety of regional data with the data provided by the National Education Panel Study (NEPS). This allows the effects of the living environment on educational opportunities to be examined down to the level of individual street sections. This is made possible by a uniform geodata grid: In the NEPSGeoDaten project, the address information of participants in NEPS cohorts 1 to 6 was converted into geocoordinates and transferred to a grid of 100-square-meter cells. This now makes it possible to link a wide range of contextual information from data sources with the same grid size to the NEPS data and thus analyze the significance of place of residence for educational opportunities and educational decisions.
Educational opportunities in Germany depend on many factors, such as gender, family background, and social and ethnic origin. However, a person's living environment can also influence the educational opportunities available to them and how they perceive these opportunities in many ways. This, in turn, has an impact on a person's success in the labor market, their income, and their health. For example, the social situation in a residential neighborhood may be associated with different educational opportunities for schoolchildren. This is one of the reasons why the federal and state governments have decided to launch the Startchancen-Programm (Start Opportunities Program), which will support schools in particularly disadvantaged neighborhoods from the 2024/25 school year onwards. The georeferenced NEPS data can now be used to investigate whether the social situation of residential areas actually influences children's skills and educational pathways. The consequences of proximity or distance to certain types of educational institutions can also be analyzed with the new linking option.
In order to make the NEPS data usable for such diverse small-scale analyses, the addresses of around 52,000 respondents to the NEPS longitudinal study were transferred to a uniform geodata grid provided by the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG). The spatial resolution of the grid is 100 x 100 meters. In Germany, there are other data sources that offer a wide range of contextual information on the same grid, such as air quality, traffic noise, or the composition of the neighborhood. Such regional data can now be combined with the NEPS data at the request of data users. The key advantage of this procedure is that the linked information can be evaluated in a time-stable and comparable manner, and its origin and significance can be scientifically verified.
For data protection reasons, the spatial data linked to respondent IDs cannot be passed on directly to researchers. Data users who want to work with the new georeferencing can have the contextual information they have selected linked to the NEPS data via the LIfBi Research Data Center (FDZ) and work with the resulting data sets in the LIfBi data security room. Analyses, log files, or graphics can then be exported from the protected area by the FDZ and taken away. Detailed information can be found in a new NEPS Survey Paper on the NEPSGeoDaten project.
Original publication
Helbig, M., Karwath, C., Koberg, T. & Ruland, M. (2025). NEPSGeoDaten: Anreicherung der im Panel verfolgten Bestandskohorten des NEPS mit umfangreichen Raumdaten. (NEPS Survey Paper No. 125). Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsverläufe, Nationales Bildungspanel. https://doi.org/10.5157/NEPS:SP125:1.0
For data users
In addition to the new georeferencing process, the FDZ offers two further options for working with regional data:
Information on all regional data