The Growing Up in Digital Europe Preparatory Phase (GUIDEPREP) project further develops the research infrastructure (RI) necessary to implement the GUIDE birth cohort study. This preparatory work will take place across 2022 to 2025 to ready the RI for the fullscale piloting of the GUIDE in 2026 and the first full wave of data collection in 2027. Once operational, GUIDE will collect data about individual children growing up in Europe until those children are aged 24-years in approximately 2053. GUIDE will be Europe’s first comparative birth cohort study of children’s and young people’s wellbeing. The aim of the GUIDE study is to track children’s personal wellbeing and development, in combination with key indicators of children’s homes, neighbourhoods, and schools, across Europe. GUIDE will be an accelerated cohort survey including a sample of infants as well as a sample of school age children. Each Member State and Associated Country will provide nationally representative samples that are designed to retain statistical power throughout the lifetime of the study. The harmonized design will create the first internationally comparable, nationally representative, longitudinal study of children and young people in Europe. Currently the GUIDE RI is in its preparatory phase, which involves the establishment of necessary operational procedures and further crystallisation of the study concept and design. To realise the GUIDE full-scale pilot in 2026 and first wave of fieldwork in 2027, the RI needs to develop administratively, technologically, financially, scientifically, and legally. This GUIDEPREP proposal lays out clear aims for these developments in an interlocking system of activities that are shared across consortium partners and managed by the GUIDE leadership team.  

The aspiration to secure the wellbeing of children and young people is explicit in Grand Challenges such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The EU has similarly highlighted the importance of securing the future of children and young people. It has become accepted that inequalities must be thought of longitudinally and not regarded as static events unrelated to prior events and future likelihoods. Policy makers must ensure that they base their policy interventions and adjustments on the best evidence available and this must include, inter alia, cohort survey data. COORDINATE will begin to fill the serious and extensive gaps in the availability of robust and suitable data for the monitoring and evaluation of child wellbeing in Europe. The COORDINATE project brings together 22 partners from 14 countries who will initiate the community of researchers and organisations that will drive forwards the coordinated development of comparative birth cohort panel survey research in Europe. COORDINATE will: • Facilitate improved access to international birth cohort panel and cross-sectional survey data • Extend the consortium network to maximise EU and European coverage for a future Europe wide accelerated birth cohort survey • Undertake joint research in the form of a large-scale cohort pilot survey using a harmonised instrument and research design in key European countries The infrastructural community initiated by COORDINATE will benefit from enhanced access to current infrastructural data platforms, and will promote the harmonisation of and improve access to international cohort panel survey data in the study of children as they grow up. COORDINATE continues the research initiated in the FP7 Measuring Youth Well Being project (GA613368) and the H2020 European Cohort Development Project (GA777449) to prepare the next phases of Europe’s first cross-national accelerated birth cohort survey: EuroCohort - Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE).

Biographical research in sociology is usually carried out by means of in-depth interviews where people are asked to tell their life histories or experiences in a given stage of life and/or dimension of existence. Occasionally, secondary materials such as photographs, letters, timelines or life calendars are also used to complement the narrative. In both cases the focus is on first person testimonies, assuming that the information collected through these procedures provides a more direct and reliable access to the events and subjectivity of the life course. Much less explored is the possibility of reconstituting a biography not only in this way, but also on the basis of testimonies of third parties, specifically close people who can talk about the trajectories of the individual being analysed and about the relation they have with that person. What we intend to do in this project is precisely to understand how biographies can be reconstituted and analysed through multiple testimonies, using triangulation and comparison of sources of information. Mobilising a qualitative methodology, by means of biographical interviews, the aim is to comprehend how a person describes and ascribes meanings to her/his life, but also how close people perceive, present and interpret that biographical pathway. Twenty biographies will be analysed, each case being composed of the interview with the nuclear person and about four interviews with her/his family members, friends, colleagues or neighbours (of different kinship, generations, life contexts). In this way it is possible to combine each person's view of herself/himself and her/his biography with the perception that significant others have of those same experiences. Thus, it is intended to articulate an internal perspective with an external one on the same person and respective biography. This analytical strategy enables the study of the temporal, social and relational constitution of a biography, in line with the typical analytical fra...

The life course perspective combines a rigorous, critical and systematic yet flexible theoretical approach to core sociological issues with methodological and epistemological eclectic nature and potential. Aiming to build bridges between past and future Life Course Research, this project tackles one appraised but underexplored principle, the "linked lives" principle, based on which "each generation is bound to fateful decisions and events in the other's life course". This will allow us to tackle family as a microcosms of inequalities, and as an observatory of interdependency and cross-effects of life events. Using a multi-dimensional logic, this project will ask different but interconnected questions concerning the interdependency of life events across an individual's life (including various spheres of life) and within the family (as a whole individually through some of its members), by developing different methodologies. A quantitative approach, based on the EU-SILC both multilevel and longitudinal data, aims to tackle cross-effects between family, work and wellbeing, both at an European and at the National Portuguese level. This European, macro and comparative level analysis, also provides relevant information about the specificity, or lack thereof, of the Portuguese case, which is useful for the subsequent and at a certain points overlapped qualitative components of the research. A qualitative approach, using primary sources of data (80 to 100 interviewees), intends to put the flesh onto the bones of the understanding of the linkages between certain life events in one or more life courses, by accessing the subjectivities and intentionality of the actions, and also the effects experienced. Biographical interviews will be carried out with life calendars and family trees, which will be subject to content analysis and holistic form analysis. Quantitative longitudinal analysis will also be used for life calendar information. This will be done at both individual and fa...

The European Cohort Development Project (ECDP) is a Design Study which will create the specification and business case for a European Research Infrastructure that will provide, over the next 25 years, comparative longitudinal survey data on child and young adult well-being. The infrastructure developed by ECDP will subsequently coordinate the first Europe wide cohort survey, named EuroCohort.

MYWeB takes a balanced approach to assessing the feasibility of a European Longitudinal Study for Children and Young People (ELSCYP) through prioritising both scientific and policy imperatives. Striking the appropriate balance between science and policy is guaranteed through the use of an evaluation/appraisal methodology which ensures that the outcomes will be methodologically robust, technically feasible and will represent value for money. A full scale pilot study in six countries means original empirical data on field experiences will provide direct evidence of the feasibility of an ELSCYP. Engagement with a wide range of stakeholders including policy-makers at a European, Member State and regional level ensures that the project outcomes take into account the broadest range of policy makers. Questions about the “value added” that a longitudinal survey can offer over a cross-sectional survey will, therefore, be fully informed by policy agendas. Children and Young People are integrated into the project plan to contribute to the operationalisation of notions of well-being as well as in understanding the best modes of conducting an ELSCYP. The MYWeB consortium contains researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and provides expertise in the areas of children and young people’s well-being, childhood care; education; the environment in which a child grows up, childhood/youth work and leisure and participation. In addition, all teams are experienced in undertaking questionnaire survey research. Each Delivery Partner and Collaborator in the consortium is part of the FP7 funded MYPLACE project and have direct experience of working with one another on a large and complex project and the requirements to deliver to contract. The consortium contains a team with international repute in the methodology of longitudinal surveys ensuring that the project outcomes are informed by cutting edge scientists working in this field of methodology.

O estudo dos processos de mobilidade social, especialmente o de natureza qualitativa, não tem tido o devido protagonismo na análise das profundas mudanças sociais que ocorreram em Portugal nas últimas décadas. O mesmo se pode referir acerca da análise das famílias como “microcosmos” destes mesmos processos. Usando a perspectiva do curso de vida, os seus “dois pontos de entrada” (macro e micro) e uma metodologia centrada na família como principal unidade de análise, este projecto contribuirá para um maior conhecimento dos processos de mobilidade social em Portugal. A análise de dados do ECHP e EU-SILC permitirá a identificação de padrões de mobilidade social e a sua comparação europeia; e a análise de dados de natureza qualitativa (de fonte primária), numa estratégia “biográfico-interpretativa” baseada em entrevistas biográficas, calendários de vida e árvores genealógicas, permitirá a compreensão e a diferenciação inter-generacional dos processos e estratégias de mobilidade social que ocorrem nas famílias.

In recent years the increasing migratory pressure in Portugal and its growing demographic and cultural importance has become an issue of general interest and wide debate. There remains, however, inadequate scientific knowledge about the configurations and conditions that characterize this segment of Portuguese society, one that is considerably heterogeneous from a cultural, social and age-structure point of view. In the field of sociology, there is a shortage of data regarding, for example, the social composition, schooling processes and life courses of the young descendants of immigrants in Portugal. For this reason, this research proposes to build a stock of multidimensional information that helps us to state the issues and allows rectification of some of the insufficiencies ascertained.