About Data Access

The time has come: From 2 June 2025, the data from the first, second and third waves of FReDA will be available to the scientific community. The dataset contains the recruitment wave W1R as well as the sub-waves W1A, W1B, W2A, W2B, W3A and W3B. In addition, FReDA offers you the data from the surveys of the partners or ex-partners of the anchors (W1A partners, W2A partners, W2B partners, W3A partners and W3B partners).

The data are available to researchers for scientific and non-commercial purposes and are distributed by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Access is free of charge. The survey focusses on questions about family and partnership.

You are also welcome to use the FReDA Data Portal for an initial free search. This provides you with a simple and convenient overview of the data and content of FReDA.

If you are interested in using the data, you must sign a data usage agreement and verify that you belong to the scientific community. Once the contract has been checked, the data will be made available to you as a Scientific Use File (SUF) from GESIS. The data can also be searched and retrieved via the GESIS search. If you have any questions about data access, please contact dataservices@gesis.org.

By the way: Students also have the opportunity to work and research with FReDA data as part of their final thesis. They can apply for data access via their lecturer. Once they have signed a user agreement with GESIS, they will also receive data access to the anonymised dataset published for researchers.

You can download the data utilisation agreement here.

If you have any questions about the content of the FReDA data, please contact our support team.