Our Services for your Research Project

Research projects generally go through a process of multiple phases – the research data cycle. Each individual phase of this cycle requires specific know-how to obtain significant results. GESIS has the know-how and optimizes utilization of this by offering a unique package of services to accompany the entire research data cycle.

To see what GESIS offers please select the current corresponding phase of your research project, or any other phase, and have a look at what we can offer you for your research project.

Even independently of our consulting and services, we are happy to share our knowledge from our many years of experience and research with you. Browse through our various formats such as publications, trainings, workshops and much more.

Phase 1: Planning studies and collecting data

For the collection of own data to answer research questions, the planning phase is one of the most important. It forms the foundation for the quality of the surveys collected later and the analyses and conclusions based on them. The planning of a study – be it a survey or be it digital behavioral data – flows smoothly into the collection of the data.

Based on our many years of experience with methodologically demanding national and international survey programs, we have developed services that support you in using tested survey instruments, make the right sample selection or that enable you to collect your data via the GESIS Panel Infrastructure. Would you also like to collect your own digital behavioral data? Here, too, we offer services.

We are also happy to accompany you in this phase with our consulting services and offer comprehensive information and guidelines for this phase.

Phase 2: Finding and accessing data

Data are already available for many research questions, so that it is often not necessary to conduct your own surveys. A lot of data covers long periods of time to analyze change and/or has been conducted in multiple countries. The reuse of data for secondary analyses not only saves time and financial resources, it also helps to verify and expand findings in the spirit of open science.

In our data archive, almost 7000 data from national and international studies are available for download for secondary analyses. They are user-friendly and often elaborately processed. Our research data centres maintain the special holdings with a long-standing tradition. These include renowned study programmes such as ALLBUS, or, at the international level, the International Survey Programme or the Eurobarometer data.

A special focus is also on survey data on elections and education in the adult sector.

Phase 3: Processing and analyzing data

Well-processed data is the basis for meaningful analyses. Processing and analyses usually flow smoothly into each other.

Here, too, we support you with our services in preparing your own data or secondary data that has already been collected in such a way that your analyses are on a secure basis. Our experts will help you with the correct weighting or harmonization of data over time or different surveys. We also offer services for the analysis of digital behavioral data.

Comprehensive metadata and tools are available for data from official statistics in Germany and Europe, and in our safe rooms you can also analyze sensitive data from other data archives. Of course, we will also advise you on your specific analysis questions during this phase.

Phase 4: Archiving and sharing

In the spirit of open science and the reuse of data that has already been collected, we support the sharing of scientific outputs and offer the opportunity to make your results available to the scientific community and to use them further via our repositories.

In addition to data from surveys, the provision of scripts and syntax is also an important measure to replicate and develop results. The tested measuring instruments made available for further scientific dissemination help to ensure the comparability and quality of data from planned surveys.

The sharing of data, instruments or programming also increases the awareness of your research work and completes your publications.

We also support open access through our publication repository SSOAR.

Sharing knowledge

We share our expertise on all topics related to survey methodology, data analysis, computational social science and research data management. We provide individual advice on our services and the individual phases, we offer practical orientation through our guides and guidelines as well as our online lecture series Meet the experts.

The GESIS Training offers further training opportunities in various formats and for every level of knowledge.

In the GESIS publications, social science topics are published in various formats in an application- and basic-oriented manner.