Study Design

The GLHS was begun in 1980 under the leadership of Karl Ulrich Mayer.

From 1981 to 1983, 2,171 life histories of a representative sample of West Germans born in 1929-31, 1939-41 and 1949-51 were collected.

In the years 1985-87, the cohort group from 1919-1921 was added with 1,412 cases, 407 of whom were collected via face-to-face interview, while the remaining 1,005 interviews were collected with a computer-assisted telephone survey.

Data for the birth cohorts from 1954-56 and 1959-61 were collected in 1989, resulting in 2,008 computer-assisted telephone interviews.

After the fall of the Berlin wall, 2,331 men and women belonging to four birth cohorts (1929-31, 1939-41, 1951-53, and 1959-61) who were resident in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1990 were interviewed between September 1991 and October 1992. A follow-up mail survey of 1,267 of these respondents took place between June and August 1993.

Between May 1996 and January 1998, the East German component was expanded with a survey of 610 men and women who were born in 1971 and still resident in East Germany in October 1990.

Finally, West Germans born in 1964 and 1971 were interviewed in 1998-99 with a sample size of 2,909 respondents. The samples for the latter two cohorts included for the first time foreign nationals, reflecting the changing composition of the residential population at that age and time. A follow-up with the 1971 cohort was completed in 2005.