Help needed

Dear Colleagues,
I would like to do a research with the NEPS data on the role that non-formal education and work experiences done at the age of 16 have on their labour market outcomes at the age of 20-24.
I am also interested in careers expectations of young people when they are 16.
Which data should i use? which questions?
I would be very grateful if someone familiar with NEPS data could help me by introducing me to the data and questionnaies.

Hello Francesco,

sounds like you could probably use NEPS starting cohort 4 (SC4). Maybe you can check out the SC4 documentary and the nepsplorer (https://www.neps-data.de/Data-Center/Overview-and-Assistance/NEPSplorer) as a first starting point. It would help you to get an overview over potential variables and the overall feasability of that research project with NEPS SC4.

Dont hesitate to ask further questions then.

Kind regards,
Alexander Helbig

Dear Francesco,

I can only confirm Alexander’s advice to use the NEPSplorer as a starting point for a search for items and variables. As already communicated by e-mail, I also see the SC4 as a starting point for your research interests.

In addition, I can point out to our further documentation material. In order to give data users a good start in working with NEPS data, we offer
extensive documentation material on our website, and
here I would like to draw particular attention to the survey instruments and the codebook.
We provide a codebook in which you will find univariate distributions of all variables.
For example, the codebook for SC4. You can
easily search for keywords in this document by pressing Ctrl+F.

I would also like to refer to our NEPS tutorials: The tutorials are intended to facilitate the introduction to the work with NEPS data. They provide general information on the Starting Cohorts of the National Education Panel and on the data structures of the Scientific Use Files. Currently, three videos are available, but the series of NEPS tutorials will be continuously expanded over time

Kind regards
Lydia