From the Authors' Preface
When we presented our first survey of children in Germany in 2007, we promised that it would not be the last. This second study keeps this promise. We are pleased to be able to contribute to providing regular social reports on the youngest generation—with the support of a major child welfare organization, the charitable nongovernmental organization "World Vision Deutschland e. V."
We have adopted the same design and structure as in the first 2007 World Vision Kinderstudie in Germany and done our best to address as many of the original topics as possible a second time round. This permits comparisons across time. World Vision Deutschland plans to carry on commissioning this type of survey of children at regular intervals of approximately 4 years. This will make it possible to plot and assess the life situation of children from a longitudinal perspective.
The survey aims to deliver a representative picture of the life situation along with the desires, needs, and interests of children in Germany. This should give a public "voice" to the members of the youngest generation. In a society dominated increasingly by older generations, we wish—as already emphasized in the first survey—to give the youngest generation an opportunity to present their life situations from their own perspective, and to make this possible in both a committed and impartial way.
World Vision Deutschland commissioned the survey. However, we, the authors, are responsible for its content. As in the first survey, different people were responsible for different tasks. A scientific team headed by Sabine Andresen at Bielefeld University and Klaus Hurrelmann at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin were responsible for the survey's theoretical design and scientific quality. A research team at TNS Infratest Sozialforschung in Munich was responsible for the methods and analyzing the empirical data. Both teams cooperated closely with each other and coordinated each stage of their work. Although World Vision Deutschland was regularly informed about both teams' decisions, it did not interfere in the different stages of the work. This ensures the survey's complete scientific independence and methodological neutrality.
The structure and organization of the second World Vision Kinderstudie follows that of the first. However, we have also been able to introduce several theoretical and methodological innovations and extensions. Theoretically, the second study pays more attention to capturing the subjective appraisals of 6- to 11-year-old children in all areas of their lives. For the first time, this permits a more precise assessment of the subjective life quality—the well-being that the children themselves experience in their daily worlds. It also involves a markedly more comprehensive analysis of the children's appraisal of relative poverty, because the first study had shown that this aspect is decisive for assessing the quality of life.
This time, our methods have proceeded one step further. Experiences gathered in the first survey showed that it was possible to include 6- to 7-year-olds in a representative survey. As a result, we had to reformulate the questionnaire to match the linguistic and cognitive abilities of this age group. The first survey had excluded them from the representative survey because there was simply not enough experience with standardized questionnaire surveys in such young children.
This second World Vision Kinderstudie is based on a representative survey of 2,500 children between the ages of 6 and 11 years supplemented by information from their parents. To gather authentic portraits of individual children, one-to-one interviews were also carried out with 12 children in this age range. This combination of "quantitative" and "qualitative" assessments is a decisive methodological feature of our study. Both methodological approaches confirm how capable children are of delivering expert information on their own life situation. They are the ones who know their lifeworlds best, and they possess the age-appropriate competencies to evaluate their life situation and appraise it according to their own benchmarks, With the present survey, we wish to confirm that this expertise is also to be found in 6- to 7-year-olds—an age group who has previously been surveyed only extremely rarely in systematic empirical research.
Each chapter is headed by the names of the authors who have written it and who are responsible for its content. Sabine Andresen and Klaus Hurrelmann's scientific team was supported by Susann Fegter at Bielefeld University and Katharina Rathmann at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. The survey itself was carried out by the TNS Infratest Sozialforschung in Munich. Ulrich Schneekloth, Ingo Leven, and Monika Pupeter performed the analyses and compiled the reports. Another major contributor to completing this book was Ulrike Müller who was doing a student internship at Infratest while the study was being carried out.
The qualitative part of the study was performed by three child therapists—Daniel Schroeder, Millaray Abujatum, and Katharina Knispel—and one sociologist—Sibylle Picot. They are also the authors of the individual child portraits.
The authors wish to thank all the children for generously allowing us to enter their lives and gather the data for our survey and portraits.
The Authors
