Finding and accessing data

No social science study without data - we offer you more than 6,500 national and international studies for secondary analysis in our data archive. The GESIS archive and the repositories are among the most comprehensive of the profession in the German-speaking world.

Outstanding data also enjoys a special service with us. Our Research Data Centers provide support for a number of survey programs in which GESIS participates partially in the data collection and/or takes over the tasks of data preparation, archiving and provision on a permanent basis. These include the German General Social Survey ALLBUS, the German Longitudinal Study GLES and the International Social Survey Programme ISSP. The data are compiled into collections and variables are harmonized and standardized, allowing comparative analyses over time or across national borders. You can search and order all data in a user-friendly way in our GESIS data search.

Search for data

Access to further International Data

GESIS offers you access to further selected data collections, election studies, and international surveys, such as:

EU Neighbourhood Barometer: A regional, cross-country comparative series of six regional surveys conducted between 2012 and 2014
European Election Studies (EES): Investigate voting behaviour in elections to the European Parliament and examine the development of the political community, citizens' perceptions and evaluations of the EU political system, and much more
Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES): Data from post-election surveys of about 40 countries. It has been conducted every five years since 1996
Inter-University Consortium for Politcal and Social Research (ICPSR): The world's largest collection of digitised social science data. These data can be used for secondary analyses, for teaching, for articles or theses - GESIS is a member of the ICPSR
CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC). Data Sets from more than 20 European countries. These contain descriptions of the more than 40,000 data collections held by CESSDA service providers, including those of GESIS
Corona Pandemic Data Collection: An overview of our own surveys and collected data around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Access to Protected Data

Some data cannot be accessed via the GESIS data search for data protection reasons, as they are more detailed and sensitive. We offer access to these specially protected data in our Secure Data Center in Cologne (survey data) as well as in our Safe Room in Mannheim (official data).