The current research project of the Research Working Group for Higher Education is concerned with analyzing and evaluating current challenges faced by students at German universities. Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), three rapid response surveys are being carried out, each involving around 2,000 students and around 2,000 people from the general public. Surveyexperiments will be included in each survey for in-depth analysis. The project will start in June 2024 and run for one year.
In consultation with the BMBF, the challenges selected are topics that relate to current problems, burdens or innovations and demonstrate a high need for information, as well as topics that have a high research relevance. For each survey, multifactorial survey experiments are developed in which situations and conditions are varied. Students are surveyed in randomly varied scenarios, which enables in-depth correlation analyses in interaction with individual (and/or institutional and/or situational) characteristics.
The Higher Education Research Working Group has already conducted two rapid response surveys in 2023. In the feasibility study in 2023, it was determined whether reliable samples could be realized in a rapid response survey among students in Germany by involving respondents from such an online access panel. And in December 2023, students and a comparably large sample of the general population were asked about their views on the escalation of violence in Israel and Gaza and on anti-Semitic attitudes.
Other research projects that have already been completed include the joint survey “One for all. The Student Survey in Germany (SiD)", which was conducted together with the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and the Deutsches Studentenwerk (DSW), a special coronavirus survey from 2020 and an incentive study conducted at the University of Konstanz in 2019. Furthermore, the research projects “Study situation and student orientations” based on the 13 surveys of the Student Survey.