German Ageing Survey

The most recent DEAS survey wave was conducted between June 8th, 2020 and July 22nd, 2020. The focus of these interviews were items on the current living situation and subjective changes during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in various aspects of life, such as social relations, subjective well-being and employment. Interviews were conducted with panel participants who had at least once been in the DEAS sample before. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, survey methods were alterated to a shortened paper-and-pencil questionnaire

In part, a number of questions of earlier waves were repeated in order to observe potential changes, for example psychological scales of quality of life, loneliness, depression and attitudes towards ageing, internet use, sociodemographic characteristics and subjective evaluations of numerous areas of life. Additonally, the questionnaire targeted subjective changes and perceptions since the outbreak of the first Covid-19 wave, for example in the working situation, social relations, physical activities and financial circumstances.

The compact questionnaire of 2020 yielded microdata of 4.823 respondents from age 46 upwards. Among these, 4.228 had already been interviewed in 2017.

More information about data is available in the documentation and on the website of the DEAS project.

DEAS microdata is available free of charge to scientific researchers for non-profitable purposes. For reasons of data protection, signing a data distribution contract is required prior to obtaining the data.

The application form for usage of the DEAS data is here Application Form.
Data of the survey year 2020 is available in Stata- and SPSS-format with German and English labels. After signing the data distribution contract, the data can be downloaded directly from the internal download area free of charge.