In order to provide research data, the IAB draws on the register data generated during the administrative process, which is collated in the data warehouse of the Federal Employment Agency’s statistics department. This includes information on the services provided under labour market policy, on measures such as careers advice and preparation and on employment that is above the earnings threshold for social insurance contributions. The IAB adapts this information to meet the needs of research and turns it into research data. Additional data is used from quantitative studies and panels and from qualitative surveys of companies, people, households and job centres. In accordance with data protection provisions, a wide range of data sources such as company and personal data can be combined using record linkage methods. The resulting data products are made available internally for research and as a basis for policy advice. They are then processed further and made available across various channels in anonymised form to the national and international research community via the Federal Employment Agency’s Research Data Centre at the IAB. External data sources are also harnessed, most notably large, partly unstructured data (big data), which includes audio recordings of interviews taken with the permission of the interviewees.
In order to increase the quality and usability of data products for research, the IAB attaches great importance to quality assurance throughout the data lifecycle and supports this systematically through research projects. To this end, the IAB develops and evaluates new ways of collecting, correcting and analysing data using experimental methods, statistical models and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. A new longitudinal online survey, The International Mobility Panel of Migrants in Germany, will be established in 2025 and will study multiple cohorts. The survey will run for five years for each cohort, and any participants who leave Germany will continue to be included. This will allow the IAB to observe and analyse people’s intention to migrate, the reasons for emigrating and also the actual patterns of migration. In addition, new forms of collecting data in established surveys will be developed. For the Linked Personnel Panel, for example, a push-to-web approach will be established for the employee survey with the aim of encouraging participants to complete it online. The focus area will also carry out fundamental analysis in the context of a project to systematically compare approaches used in the fields of statistics and IT to produce synthetic data. This involves original data being replaced by artificially generated data. The synthetic data is generated by models that have been trained using original data. Synthetic data is particularly useful when the original data is highly sensitive as it simplifies access to the data while ensuring that strict data privacy requirements are met.
Activities
- Publications on the topic: Research Data and Methods
- Projects on the topic: Research Data and Methods
Departments
- Research Data Centre
- Statistical Methods
- Research Department Migration and International Labour Studies
- Research Department Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security
- Service Department Data and IT-Management
- Working Group Data Quality
- Working Group Qualitative Methods
