GGP · Generations and Gender Programme: A European Research Infrastructure on the Causes and Consequences of Demographic Developments

The proposed project aims at improving the ability of the social sciences to explain the causes and consequences of demographic developments, and in particular of the changing relationships between genders and generations, in a manner that would allow working out sustainable responses to policy challenges. The project develops an infrastructure that provides for a breakthrough towards better understanding of the forces that lie behind demographic developments by integrated analyses of the micro-level demographic choices of individuals and households and the various contexts in which they act. It develops and refines a multi-disciplinary population survey and a macro-level contextual database that cover the wide range of topics relevant for explaining demographic trends and behaviour, as well as their consequences. The project integrates the approaches from different disciplinary perspectives, such as demography, sociology, economics, political science, statistics, survey methodology, psychology and social psychology, and epidemiology. The work mainly builds on the platform of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), including the Generations and Gender Survey and the GGP contextual database. The resulting European research infrastructure will provide a standardized and comparative approach to interdisciplinary analyses of demographic phenomena, which covers the wide range of different European societies, is oriented towards the needs of policy-making and relies on up-to-date data sources designed to meet these analytic needs.