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Access

 

At A Glance

 

Prospective users are required to fill out data use agreements before gaining access to the data they are interested in. Separate agreements have to be filled out for each data set. In the section documentation we provide all relevant information on the available data in codebooks, technical reports, and the questionnaires. If you are unsure whether the CILS4EU data are suitalbe for your research, please take a look at these materials or contact us.

Not all datasets are available to everyone. The data of waves 1-9 and CILS4COVID (waves 4-9 and CILS4COVID only for Germany) are available to senior researchers with an institutional affiliation and graduate students writing their thesis from the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences. The Campus Use File that contains a subset of the data from waves 1-3 is available to all students with a supervisor who has an institutional affiliation. The CILS4NEPS data with harmonised data from waves 1-3 of CILS4EU and waves 1-6 of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) Starting Cohort 4 is available to reasearchers with a proven interest in analyses based on the harmonized dataset.

There are futher important differences between the available datasets.

CILS4EU vs. CILS4EU-DE

Users must apply separately for access to the first three waves of harmonized data from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden (CILS4EU, W1-3) and the follow-up study in Germany that from then on only contains the German sample (CILS4EU-DE, W4-9 and CILS4COVID).

Full vs. reduced version

For data protection reasons, two different versions are available for the Scientific Use Files of CILS4EU and CILS4EU-DE.

(1) Full version:

  • version with complete information collected during the survey
  • available only for on-site use within the facilities of the Secure Data Center (SDC) of the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences

(2) Reduced version:

  • version in which some information has been reduced and aggregated in order to prevent the identification of single respondents
  • available for download and off-site use

The structure of the full and reduced version is identical. That means that in both versions the same variables are included, but they contain different information. Variables with reduced or aggregated information are marked with an “RV” at the end of the variable name.

Our codebooks (specifically Appendix F) gives you an excellent overview about all variables that were not included or slightly edited in the reduced version. Please check them to decide whether the reduced version data are suited for your analyses or whether you need the full version.

Please be aware that the full version is only available for on-site use within the facilities of the Secure Data Center (SDC) of the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences. They are located in Cologne (Germany), but access is also possible from Mannheim (Germany) and Colchester (United Kingdom). Only the reduced version is approachable for off-site use: it is downloadable after signing a contract. When filling out the data use agreement, users have to indicate which version they want to apply for.

Campus Use File vs. Scientific Use File

The Campus Use File (CUF) of the CILS4EU data is available to graduate and undergraduate students, while the scientific use file (SUF) is only available to senior researchers and graduate students in their final year. The CUF contains data from waves 1-3 for a subsample of the German CILS4EU respondents on selected variables. Therefore, it is not possible to compare countries in the CUF data. Please refer to the documentation materials of CUF and SUF for more information on their respective contents.

CILS4NEPS

To gain access to the CIL4NEPS harmonized dataset, you must apply for access to the reduced version of the CILS4EU data waves 1-3 (via GESIS). You also have to fill out the NEPS Data Use Agreement and the RemoteNEPS Supplemental Agreement, which you can find here. Once both applications have been approved, the CILS4EU data and the NEPS data can be downloaded and used as Scientific Use Files from the respective portals. The harmonized CILS4NEPS data themselves are only accessible via remote data processing using the RemoteNEPS service.