Refugee Cohort 2 – Adolescents

The target persons of the second ReGES cohort – the Refugee Cohort 2 (RC2) – are adolescents who are 14 to a maximum of 16 years old at the start of the study and are still attending lower secondary school level of the general education system. The focus of this cohort is on the transition to upper secondary education or vocational training, which is crucial for the educational career as well as the medium- and long-term integration into the labor market. The extensive survey program includes previous school experiences of the adolescents in the country of origin and, if applicable, during their fleeing, as well as a detailed recording of their school and vocational training history in Germany. Other topics addressed health, social integration, self-assessed German language skills, and various psychological constructs such as motivation, achievement orientation, and resilience. In addition, the young people were tested on their basic cognitive abilities and German language skills.

In this cohort, adolescents serve as the primary respondents. The parents were interviewed about family background only once in the first wave. If the parents did not participate in this survey themselves, but agreed to the participation of the adolescent target persons, the latter were asked in the first wave corresponding questions about the country of origin, the social background of the family, and the educational experiences of the parents.

The consideration of the institutional context was achieved by interviewing teachers and principals at general educational schools, and in later waves also teachers and principals at vocational schools. In this way, supplementary information on the educational offerings was collected. Furthermore, questionnaires were used to receive individual assessments with regard to the linguistic and social competencies of each adolescent target person by the respective class teachers.

Another group of respondents, from whom information on the regional context of the participating families was collected (e.g., ethnic composition, infrastructural conditions), consisted of the staff responsible for the integration of refugees in the respective municipalities and the staff of the relevant collective accommodations.

Data citation

Researchers working with ReGES data are obliged to indicate the use of the data and the utilized data version (DOI) in their publications by the following acknowledgement:

This paper uses data from the project "Refugees in the German Educational System" (ReGES): Refugee Cohort 2 – Adolescents, doi:10.5157/ReGES:RC2:SUF:3.0.0, which is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number FLUCHT03 and conducted by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi).

In addition, the following reference article must be cited in all publications based on ReGES data:

Will, G., Homuth, C., von Maurice, J., & Roßbach, H.-G. (2021). Integration of Recently Arrived Underage Refugees: Research Potential of the Study ReGES – Refugees in the German Educational System. European Sociological Review 37(6): 1027–1043. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab033

ATTENTION: According to the Data Use Agreement (Art. 9), any kind of publication resulting from work with the ReGES data has to be communicated to the Research Data Center at LIfBi immediately and unsolicited via e-mail (fdz@lifbi.de).

Data documentation