Cohort Profile: The German Ageing Survey (DEAS)

Population ageing and longevity -as observed in Germany -is not simply a phenomenon of an increasing number of old people: it also involves a range of qualitative and structural changes affecting older people. For this reason the German Federal Government, aiming to improve the quality of its monitoring efforts on older people in Germany, launched the German Ageing Survey (DEAS) in the mid 1990s, under the auspices of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs and Senior Citizens (BMFuS, now German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth, BMFSFJ). In 1996, the first wave of the survey was conducted by two collaborating research groups: the Research Group on Ageing and the Life Course at the Freie Universit at in Berlin; and the Research Group on Psycho-Gerontology at the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands. From the year 2002 onwards, the German Centre of Gerontology in Berlin (DZA) has been responsible for the conduct and ongoing development of the study. The DEAS is funded by the BMFSFJ. Fieldwork for all waves (1996-2014) is carried out by the Bonn-based Institute for Applied Social Sciences (infas).