Research project
Listening to the People
German Voices is a research project documenting the lived experiences of people across Germany. Through careful listening we preserve personal narratives that help deepen understanding of contemporary German society. This qualitative technique of narrative interviews is augmented with structured survey questions in face-to-face and online surveys. In combination, these data sources enable the close collaboration of qualitative and quantitative social researchers and computational social scientists.
A shared archive of lived experience
German Voices revolutionizes the data landscape by collecting oral life-histories and personal reflections on a large sample of the general population, ensuring respectful, responsible and representative documentation of human stories.
About
German Voices is a university-led research initiative aiming to dive deeper into the roots of the structure of society and its transformation over time.
The project will collect narrative life-history interviews on a large probability-based sample of the general adult population in German. These qualitative interviews will be supplemented by structured quantitative survey interviews, both face-to-face directly following the narrative interviews and online in the context of a long-term panel. The latter serves as a tool for following the individuals’ social situations, attitudes and behaviors over time and for assessing the impact of external shocks thereon. German Voices is currently in the piloting phase. In the Summer of 2026, the first 100 narrative and face-to-face survey interviews will be collected. This pilot phase serves to test all data collection processes and tools and enable first analyses with the narrative and face-to-face survey data.Research approach
German Voices brings together researchers from a myriad of social disciplines. Qualitative sociologists can select specific individuals from the population sample for in-depth qualitative analyses. Quantitative political scientists may conduct experiments in the online surveys and track individual behaviour over time. Computational social scientists will develop new models to discover roots of human behaviour in the rich narrative data. Social linguists may focus on the narration of people’s life histories. Most importantly the data and collaborations will open up new avenues in scientific insights into the structure of societies.
Contact
Contact the PIs for more information