Recent Developments in and Upcoming Endeavors to the NEPS Survey Life Cycle

Whilst long seen as a primary benefit to survey documentation, machine-actionable survey metadata also offer possibilities to implement more efficient and less error-prone survey management procedures, like preparatory test for and conducting the survey field work. We want to showcase the recent developments undertaken for the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) making use of these opportunities. The NEPS started its newly recruited Starting Cohort 8, a panel sample of 5th graders, in 2022. For this new cohort study, NEPS implemented a whole new survey infrastructure based on freely available software components. The project’s long-established centralized and structured metadata storage housed at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) served as a backbone to re-imagine the panels’ life cycle with modern workflows. We developed automated procedures for preparing, generating, and processing survey instruments based on their reference metadata. This eliminated the need for (manually produced) programming templates as well as the manual programming of the instruments itself. Instead, the survey environment is automatically deployed to the field hardware via containerized software images. By putting the surveys’ metadata in the center of the infrastructure, we were able to accelerate survey creation and extend its testing. We also ensure the coherence of the stored metadata with the instruments contents and, ultimately, the disseminated data products and documentation. Future developments aim to extend these workflows beyond the scope of our in-house software environments, so that NEPS’ metadata can be interchanged e.g. with contracted field institutes without manual interaction. Eventually, we aim to document the tools we created publicly, so that other survey infrastructures may build upon them.