Compliance and usage in the Generations and Gender Programme

Arianna Caporali, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Tom Emery, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)

Launched in 2000 by the UNECE, the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) is a longitudinal comparative survey of 18-79 years old in 19 countries in Europe and beyond run by a consortium of research institutions. It is based on a relatively decentralized management model and relies on considerable post hoc harmonization of data. The international “core” questionnaire is either adapted to the different national contexts or partly incorporated into existing surveys. Using data from the surveys administration, we examine the quality of compliance and standardisation in the GGP and whether this affects data usage. Firstly, we examine compliance by analysing the extent to which instruments from the core questionnaire were fielded within each of the 19 countries in the GGP. The results show that on average across countries, 66% of instruments in the core questionnaire were captured. Secondly, to examine usage, we take administrative data from the GGP website to capture the number of times each country dataset is downloaded. We supplement this with an analysis of the GGP bibliography and examine the number of times a country dataset is used in peer reviewed comparative publications (about 530 references). Finally, OLS regression analyses are presented to provide an overview of the association between compliance and usage, controlling for a number of contextual variables (e.g. number of IUSSP members, population with ISCED 8 in each country). The paper concludes with recommendations for future data collection activities and with reflections on the usefulness of analysis of compliance and usage in having an overview of the quality of comparative projects.