Assessing the FAIRness of survey data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This study investigates the FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) of survey data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. During the pandemic, surveys played a crucial role in capturing public attitudes and health-related behaviors, but researchers often faced a trade-off between rapid data collection and implementing high-quality survey designs. Using metadata from the "Survey Data Collection during the COVID-19 Pandemic" (SDCCP) project, which documents 717 surveys conducted in Germany, we assessed the FAIRness of surveys published with a persistent identifier or project website using the F-UJI assessment tool. Our results show substantial variation in FAIRness scores. Surveys can be divided into two groups, with one group achieving around 88.46% FAIRness and the other averaging around 65.38%. These differences are correlated with survey design. Surveys using fast and cost-efficient designs also exhibit lower FAIRness. The findings highlight that the trade-off between rapid data production and methodological rigor during the pandemic also affected the availability and reusability of survey data.