Project COORDINATE
COhort cOmmunity Research and Development Infrastructure Network for Access Throughout Europe
GESIS is part of an international project lead by Manchester Metropolitan University working to improve child wellbeing.
COORDINATE will facilitate improved access to existing survey data on child wellbeing, increase longitudinal survey capacity across Europe through webinars, summer schools, and grants for trans-national visits, extend the GUIDE survey network, and initiate the GUIDE survey with a large-scale cohort pilot survey in Croatia Finland France and Ireland.
COORDINATE will improve child wellbeing by initiating the first ever Europe-wide birth cohort survey to track children’s wellbeing as they grow up and ensure that high quality survey data will inform policies that directly affect children’s lives.
Led by Professor Gary Pollock of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Policy Evaluation and Research Unit and Associate Professor Jennifer Symonds of The Geary Institute at University College Dublin, COORDINATE has been awarded €5 Million funding by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 to undertake a range of activities that will build the capacity and infrastructure to collect and use longitudinal survey data to improve child wellbeing across Europe.
GESIS’s part in this project is to harmonize existing data on child and youth well-being. We will develop a central database of child and youth wellbeing measures commonly used in key longitudinal and cross-sectional comparative surveys in Europe. This work will enable feedback loops to national research teams about the comparability of measurement instruments.
COORDINATE is the next phase of the GUIDE project funded by the Horizon 2020 programme in recognition that policymakers across Europe are currently unable to draw upon consistent, comparable, and high-quality data on child wellbeing to inform policy.
GUIDE will be an important source of evidence in developing social policies for children, young people and families across Europe for many years to come. It will be an accelerated cohort survey including nationally representative samples of new-born babies and school age children. With two cohorts taking place in parallel it will be possible to make cohort comparisons early in the life of the survey. GUIDE offers policy-makers unique insights into key transitions in children’s lives and the ability to make international comparisons on child and youth wellbeing. Eventually, it provides opportunities to evaluate the impact of policies over time.
"A Europe-wide birth cohort survey will allow policymakers to access large amounts of data on measures of young people’s health and wellbeing, such as stress at school and happiness in the home, and how these are affected by decisions they make at different stages of their young lives. We believe that this will give children a louder voice in the conversations about issues that affect them.” - Assoc. Prof. Symonds
- COORDINATE at GESIS
- For more information about GUIDE, please visit: https://www.eurocohort.eu
- For an animation on the importance of a Europe wide birth cohort survey visit: https://www.eurocohort.eu/news/eurocohort-now-explained-in-a-short-animation/id/165