The current Scientific Use File (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC6:17.0.0) expands the existing data with processed information from the seventeenth survey wave (16th NEPS main survey) of the Adult Starting Cohort of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). This wave was conducted primarily in the form of face-to-face interviews (CAPI) with computer-based competence tests in the domains of reading and mathematics. A smaller proportion of the study participants—those who had not taken part in previous competence assessments, or who could not be reached during the CAPI fieldwork, or who expressed a preference to do so—were interviewed by telephone (CATI) instead to update information on various aspects of their life course. The field period ranged from October 2024 to May 2025. It should be noted that the current version of the Scientific Use File does not yet include the competence measures from the recent survey wave. This data material is still going through the scaling process and will be provided in a future update as soon as data preparation is complete.
Detailed information about the realization of this panel survey wave is given in the corresponding Field Report on the website in the section „Documentation“. The updated Data Manual as the central guide for understanding and working with the data of the Scientific Use File (SUF) of Starting Cohort 6 is also available there. The same is true for the Release Notes with information about adjustments regarding data preparation, the Instruments in a field and a SUF version, the Codebook with basic frequencies of all variables, the Weights Report, the Anonymization Report, and other data documentation materials.
Starting Cohort 6: including documentation
NEPS Data Portfolio including download
NEPS Data Access including application forms