06.09.2022 HeFDI University Publishes Extensive Research Database from Survey on Health for Scientific Reuse

HeFDI site Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences provides data from over 40,000 questionnaires from the panel study "Health Behavior and Accident History in School Age" (GUS) in the research data infrastructure of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Progress for scientific follow-up use.

The treasure is shared! Data collected in the project "Health Behavior and Accident History at School Age (GUS)", the Research Center for Demographic Change (FZDW) of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (Frankfurt UAS) from around 10,000 schoolchildren from 14 German states between 2014 and 2020 is now published. These students were repeatedly surveyed by computer-assisted interviewers at annual intervals from the 5th to the 10th grade. This so-called panel survey was sponsored by the German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV) in order to investigate regularities in the incidence of injuries among children and adolescents and to uncover their causes.

The focus was on all injuries that occurred during school sports, in the schoolyard, in the school building, on the way to school, or at school events. By repeatedly interviewing the same students, long-term injury biographies were recorded. In addition, health-related behaviors such as sports, nutrition and risky behavior were recorded throughout the project period. In order to track down the causes of injuries and problematic health behavior, a whole range of other characteristics, such as personality, leisure activities, family environment and school performance, or the social situation of the students, were also collected. This extensive program of questions can also be used to address issues beyond injury and health research, for example from psychology, pedagogy or the sociology of education. "Even while conducting the study, we kept thinking: 'These data are so valuable for science, we have to make more of them!'" explains project leader Prof. Dr. Andreas Klocke.

Thanks to a project grant from the Consortium for Social, Behavioral, Educational and Economic Sciences (KonsortSWD) and the great dedication of project collaborator Robert Lipp, this project has now become a reality. Lipp has been employed at FZDW for many years and was already responsible for data processing during the regular term of GUS. Since 2019, he has also been a research data management officer at Frankfurt UAS. The perfect fit, then, to further process the data, document it in a quality manner, and make it available in a findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable manner in accordance with good scientific practice and the FAIR principles. "Open science has always been a concern of mine, and I am very pleased that we have created a comprehensive and effortlessly reusable data product here," clarifies Robert Lipp. Of course, the anonymity of the respondents was guaranteed.

Another important factor in the success of the project was the excellent cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Educational Pathways (LIfBi), which, with GUS, has for the first time included a completely externally generated data product in its high-quality research data infrastructure (see press release). The dataset and the documentation materials are permanently available there and can be used by interested researchers for their own analyses free of charge after signing a data use contract with LIfBi.

The data set is available at https://doi.org/10.5157/GUS:SUF:1.0

More about the project Health Behavior and Accident History in School Age from the Research Center for Demographic Change at Frankfurt UAS at https://fzdw.de/projekte/gus/.