Objectives
The goal of the project was to contribute to the reconstruction the social history of the GDR by studying the life courses of men and women from four GDR birth cohorts.
- First, the project aimed to cast light on the reasons behind the crisis and collapse of East German society. Do the life histories of GDR citizens contain indications of developments within the GDR that did not necessarily trigger the collapse of the state, but may have paved the way for and contributed to the social upheavals of 1989/90?
- Second, the project was intended to describe and explain processes of transformation in East Germany. In particular, to what extent were the fates of those directly affected by reunification a consequence of different life histories and/or of collective generational experiences prior to 1990?
- Third and finally, the project aimed to advance the sociology of the GDR. We were particularly interested in how the lives of GDR citizens had been regulated and controlled by the state and the ruling Socialist Unity Party, how much structural room for maneuver there had been, and to what extent respondents were able to pursue and assert their own interests.
Questionnaire Design
To address these questions, face-to-face interviews were conducted using a standardized life history questionnaire. The respondents' educational, occupational, family, and residential histories were reconstructed retrospectively as continuous event histories using empirical and quantitative interview methods, as were their memberships of key political and social organizations in the GDR. This makes it possible to trace the respondents' life histories in these different domains on a month-by-month basis (see Fragebogen-Hauptstudie, pdf format, 395 KB). In addition to these event histories, standardized and open questions tapped individual experiences, living conditions, opinions, and value orientations. The focus of the 1993 follow-up postal survey was on psychological scales measuring control beliefs, control strategies, and feelings of self-esteem. Data on the respondents' occupational and family situation at the time of the survey and on changes in their social networks since the collapse of the Berlin Wall were also collected (see Fragebogen-Nachbefragung, pdf format, 1060 KB).
A detailed description of the questionnaire design of the main study and the paper-and-pencil follow-up survey is provided in the Data Documentation (pdf format, 701 KB).
Sample Design
Cohort Design
After a preparatory phase lasting almost one year, during which two pilot studies were conducted, East German men and women belonging to the 1929-31, 1939-41, 1951-53, and 1959-61 birth cohorts were questioned in detail about their life histories in cooperation with the Institute for Applied Social Sciences (infas) in Bonn. These cohorts were selected for two reasons. First, given that they had spent different periods of their lives in the GDR, comparing these four cohorts affords an opportunity for in-depth investigation of social change in the GDR. The cohort perspective on life histories makes it possible to explore the interaction of individual and historical processes and the interplay of political intervention, institutional settings, and individual lifestyles. Second, these cohorts were chosen to ensure that the LV-DDR data was comparable with the corresponding data from the West German samples (LV West I, LV West II, LV West III). One exception is that the 1951-53 cohort was surveyed in East Germany (cf. the 1949-51 and 1954-56 cohorts in West Germany). The reason for this is that family policy measures put in place at the 8 th Party Conference of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1971 first applied to the family formation phase of this cohort. The survey questionnaire was developed to be both compatible with the West German life history surveys and appropriate to the lives of the East German respondents.
Sample Design
Independently of the "Life Courses and Historical Change in the German Democratic Republic" (LV-DDR) project, the Institute for Applied Social Sciences (infas) in Bonn had the opportunity to draw a master sample from the central register of the former GDR in October 1990. All those registered have the same overall probability of selection for this master sample; thus, the sample is self-weighting. It is based on a sample of communities that was stratified by the 217 urban and rural administrative districts and 10 classes of administrative district size existing at the time. In the cities, the boroughs were also included in the stratification, giving a total of 267 strata. The addresses drawn were located in 427 East German communities (including East Berlin), comprising 560 sampling points. An equal number of addresses was available for each of these sampling points, meaning that the master sample is not clustered within the communities. The sample used in the present study was drawn at random from this master sample for each cohort separately.
It should be noted that, because the master sample was drawn in October 1990, those who had already moved to West Germany at this point were not included. However, the 8 persons who moved after October 1990 were "chased up" and interviewed at their new place of residence.
Data Collection
The main field period ran from September 1991 to October 1992. A total of 2,331 persons were interviewed, with approx. 600 interviews per cohort and virtually equal proportions of men and women. The coverage rate of 52 percent (see Table 1) corresponds to that of comparable studies. This is particularly notable given that conditions in the field were relatively difficult, particularly in the second half of the field period – presumably owing to the increasing public debate on widespread collaboration with the Stasi, the East German secret police, and to squads of door-to-door salespeople posing as "interviewers" trying to sell newspaper subscriptions.
Table 1: Sample Coverage and Reasons for Non-Participation in the Main Study 1991/92
| |
Birth Cohort |
Total |
| |
1929-31 |
1939-41 |
1951-53 |
1959-61 |
N |
% |
| Gross sample |
1,141 |
1,185 |
1,188
|
1,236 |
4,750 |
100.0 |
| Neutral non-response |
36 |
49 |
79 |
117 |
281 |
5.9 |
| Adjusted sample |
1,105 |
1,136 |
1,109 |
1,119 |
4,469 |
100.0 |
| No contact to household or target person |
34 |
41 |
57 |
72 |
204 |
4.6 |
| Ill |
37 |
22 |
10 |
15 |
84 |
1.9 |
| Refusals |
436 |
477 |
458 |
451 |
1,822 |
40.8 |
| Not specified |
3 |
8 |
5 |
5 |
21 |
0.5 |
| Realized interviews |
595 |
588 |
579 |
576 |
2,338 |
52.3 |
| Unusable interviews |
3 |
2 |
1 |
4 |
7 |
0.2 |
| Usable interviews/coverage rate |
592 |
586 |
578 |
572 |
2,331 |
52.2 |
Face-to-face interviews were conducted, lasting on average 2 ¾ hours (without breaks) across all cohorts. The average interview length for the youngest cohort was 2 ½ hours; for the oldest cohort it was approx. 3 hours. Interestingly, there were no gender differences in the average interview length.
Between June and August 1993, a paper-and-pencil follow-up study was conducted with those respondents who had agreed to participate in a panel survey when interviewed in 1991/92. In total, 1,267 interviews were realized. This corresponds to a coverage rate of 65 percent in the subsample of those willing to participate in the panel survey (see Table 2). 54 percent of those interviewed in 1991/92 also participated in the follow-up study.
Table 2: Sample Coverage and Reasons for Non-Participation in the Pencil-and-Paper Follow-Up Study
| |
N |
% |
| Gross sample |
1,992 |
100.0 |
| Neutral non-response |
56 |
2.8 |
| Adjusted sample |
1,936 |
100.0 |
| No response |
640 |
33.1 |
| Explicit refusals |
29 |
1.5 |
| Realized cases |
1,267 |
65.4 |
Representativeness
The Institute for Applied Social Sciences (infas) in Bonn tested the representativeness of the sample realized in the 1991/92 study in terms of the available structural characteristics (gender, cohort, federal state, size of place of residence), and concluded that the sample can indeed be considered representative (Hess/Smid 1995, p. 22). Representativeness checks with respect to further respondent characteristics, such as education and occupational position, were not conducted, as the scope and power of the comparative data available for this point of time were limited.
For the paper-and-pencil follow-up survey, no substantial systematic selectivity – in terms of the probability of target persons being included in the sample realized – was found with respect to the content dimensions of interest (e.g., gender, occupational position, membership of the Socialist Unity Party, unemployment rate).
Data Editing
The data from the 1991/92 survey were submitted to several rounds of thorough and detailed editing, the first of which was conducted by the Institute for Applied Social Sciences (infas) in Bonn. The aim of this first round of editing was to check the data for temporal consistency within the domains and to make first corrections (e.g., replacing the response "summer" for by the code "27" when the expected response was a month). This first stage in the editing process did not require decisions to be made on matters of content. It was followed by second and third rounds of editing, carried out by the project team at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin with the support of a team of student research assistants. The aim of this phase in the editing process was to produce a complete dataset that was both consistent and plausible, following a comprehensive set of rules (see Erstedition und Dateneingabe and Zweiteditionshandbuch). To this end, a sizeable proportion of the respondents were re-contacted. This does not imply that the final dataset is free of "missing values," however. If it was not possible to clarify issues once and for all or to obtain missing data, this is noted in the edited dataset.
Standardized coding of the many open responses was carried out by the project team and by the Centre for Survey Research and Methodology (ZUMA) in Mannheim. New coding schemes were developed for many of the open questions (e.g., job classifications specific to the GDR, a scheme for coding life goals, and reasons for changing jobs or moving house).
Notes on Data Analysis
The public-use file of the "Life Courses and Historical Change in the German Democratic Republic" study (LV-DDR) that is available from the Central Archive for Empirical Social Research (ZA) in Cologne consists of individual SPSS data files for each of the domains surveyed. This public-use file was produced in consultation with the data protection officer of the Max Planck Society. Any direct references to places and all open responses were removed. The original respondent ID numbers were replaced by new ID variables produced by a random generator. The ordering of cases was also changed so that no direct links can be made between the data files and the questionnaires themselves.
Documentation (Downloads, in German)
Hannah Brückner und Karl Ulrich Mayer: Lebensverläufe und gesellschaftlicher Wandel
Konzeption, Design und Methodik der Erhebung von Lebensverläufen der Geburtsjahrgänge 1954 - 1956 und 1959 - 1961. Materialien aus der Bildungsforschung Nr. 48. Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung Berlin 1995.
