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The COVID-19 pandemic and associated government lockdown restrictions have fueled a high demand for survey data on how individuals and establishments are coping with the restrictions. However, the pandemic has also dramatically affected surveys themselves, forcing research institutes to adapt their fieldwork operations to the uncertain and evolving conditions. This paper documents the specific impacts of the pandemic on several ongoing surveys at the Institute for Employment Research in Germany, and describes how these impacts have been addressed. In addition, this paper summarizes efforts to rapidly develop new Covid-19 surveys to help meet the increasing demand for timely data about the effects of the Corona-Crisis on the labor market.

Third-party presence is considered a potential threat to the quality of sensitive information gathered in face-to-face interviews. Issues arising from interference and reduced privacy due to bystander presence appear particularly pressing in child surveys: Parental presence is quite common and likely more pervasive as compared to other interviewee-bystander constellations. Focusing on surveys designed to capture multiple perspectives on the same issues, a key question is whether child interviews – in addition to parent information – can provide an independent opinion if parents are present during the interview. Using longitudinal multi-actor data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), the present study evaluates the impact of parental presence on child-parent discrepancies in survey reports on children’s problem behaviors and difficulties in the parent-child relationship. The longitudinal analysis of child-parent dyads allows for a more extensive consideration of selection processes of parental presence as compared to cross-sectional approaches. While descriptive results suggest that parent and child reports are more similar when parents are present, fixed-effects regression analyses do not find any effects of changes in parental presence on reporting discrepancies within child-parent dyads.

Underrepresentation of life changes is an important issue for panel studies, which are designed to describe such changes. Little is known, however, about the impact of changes that are related to the survey topic. This paper examines the effects of partnership dissolution and changes in subjective relationship stability on participation in a panel with a focus on relationship and family. We consider both living apart together (LAT) and cohabiting relationships. Using 2008-2014 data from the German Family Panel pairfam (panel analysis of intimate relationships and family dynamics), our analyses support previous findings. Reported separation negatively affects the next wave’s participation probability. Effects can be found at the contact as well as cooperation stage of the response process, whereas cooperation only appears to be affected among respondents in LAT relationships. Changes in subjective relationship instability are not strongly associated with participation in the pairfam study.