GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences: Go to homepage

Welcome to the German Microdata Lab

The GML acts as an interface between empirical social research and official statistics. This includes close cooperation with official statistics on the development of microdata for empirical social research, as well as the contribution of content-related and methodological expertise to advisory boards and committees. The team's methodological and content-related research forms the basis for competent user advice and knowledge transfer.

Our service
The service includes tools for data analysis, metadata and knowledge transfer (see below), but not the dissemination of official data. Data can be obtained from official statistics. However, it is possible to use a few old datasets as a guest researcher, at the GML.

Who is the service aimed at?
Our service on official microdata is aimed at researchers who work or want to work with official data for their analyses.

Costs
Our service is mostly free of charge for researchers. Participation fees may apply for workshops and conferences.

We provide tools and setups for the German microcensus and for European microdata such as EU-SILC or EU-LFs, with which you can process the raw data material in formats suitable for scientific research. Each data set is also comprehensively documented.  Further information can be found on the pages of the respective official data.

Instruments and Metadata

The GML provides extensive, structured metadata on German and European official microdata via its Microdata Information System (MISSY). This includes setups for preparing raw data and tools for operationalizing social science constructs.

Learn more

Knowledge Transfer

The GML offers for German and European microdata user support, workshops and user conferences.

Learn more

Guest reasearcher

In our Safe Room, various, weakly anonymized data is available via remote access.

Learn more