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Campus Use File

The main purpose of the Campus Use File (CUF) is to enable students and lecturers at universities worldwide to use CILS4EU data in learning and teaching contexts. The full Scientific Use File (SUF) as well as a reduced version is available to senior researchers and graduate students after filing a request. However, we believe that the CILS4EU data are a valuable resource for teaching and learning for undergraduate students, too. For that reason, we created the CUF, which is available to all undergraduate and graduate students, provided they are supervised or taught by a senior researcher with an institutional affiliation. The CUF is provided free of charge. For information on how to get access to the CUF data, refer to the section Campus Use File here.

All important documentation materials, including the codebook and a README file that should be consulted before using the data are freely available here. These materials contain detailed information about the content of the CUF data, the sampling and fieldwork procedures used during data collection and an overview of the differences between the CUF and SUF files. The most important differences between CUF and SUF are listed below so you can decide which version is best suited for you.

  1. The CUF only contains data from waves one to three of the German part of the CILS4EU project. Data from England, the Netherlands, and Sweden are not available in the campus use file.
  2. The CUF consists of a subsample of the recruited panel list invited to the first, second, and third wave of the German CILS4EU sample. This subsample comprises 2,498 of the 5,013 adolescents who are part of the German CILS4EU sample.
  3. Certain variables included in the SUF are not available in the CUF for data protection reasons.
  4. Certain variables in the CUF are modified versions of variables included in the SUF to ensure anonymization and enable off-site-access to the CUF.

Despite these modifications, the CUF is a great tool for students to learn about and practice data analysis with real-world data. Since it contains three waves, it is especially well suited for practicing longitudinal data analysis. The CUF also contains social network data on classroom networks in waves one and two. These can be used for social network analysis. The thematic focus on the integration of children of immigrants makes the CUF data a great source for developing and working on research questions in the area of migration and integration. However, if you want to publish your work, we strongly advise that you use the SUF data files. The CUF is a non-random subsample of the German part of the CILS4EU data. As such, substantive findings from analyses of these data might be biased and are not generalizable.