In 2009, Germany ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and committed to an inclusive education system. Students with special educational needs are increasingly being taught together with children without such needs in regular schools. As inclusive schooling has become more prevalent, the focus has shifted to the conditions and processes that promote a successful individual development for these children and adolescents. However, there is currently little or only limited evidence available on this, particularly for lower secondary education and the transitions to further educational settings or working life.
The INSIDE study – conducted as a collaborative project by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi Bamberg), the Humboldt-Universität Berlin (HU), the University of Wuppertal (BUW), and the University of Potsdam (UP) – addresses these shortcomings by examining the conditions for successful inclusive education comprehensively, nationwide (with the exception of Berlin and Brandenburg), and longitudinally. The survey design focuses on students with special educational needs and their classmates without such needs. Over a period of five years, more than 4,500 participants were initially surveyed in grade 6 and subsequently followed with almost annual survey waves and regular tests in certain competence domains. Furthermore, both the school and family contexts are explicitly taken into account through information provided by responsible teachers and specialists, as well as by school administrators and parents.
The data from these surveys have been thoroughly prepared as a Scientific Use File (SUF) and are now available for the research community to be used for own analyses. The SUF is supplemented by a data documentation package, which primarily includes a manual with practical guidance on how to understand the study and work with the data. Additional materials, including the questionnaires, wave-specific field and methods reports, as well as a codebook with the univariate frequencies of all variables in the SUF, can be downloaded for free from the website linked below.
Prerequisite for any access to the SUF is the signing of an INSIDE Data Use Agreement. The relevant form is also available on the website, together with instructions on how to complete the application and forms for expanded data access (Remote, On-Site) or for changing an existing agreement.
To the INSIDE data