What is GGP?

Who are we?

The Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) is an international research infrastructure in the field of social sciences. Its aim is to provide high-quality, internationally comparable individual data on life courses, which help to understand demographic changes by referring to their main components:

• families,
• gender (social roles played by men and women),
• generations (intergenerational relationships).

The main element of the GGP is the panel survey called the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS). In Poland, this survey is known as "Generations and Families" and includes three waves conducted every three years on a large representative sample. The individual data from the GGS is complemented by the GGP Contextual Database, which contains information on the economic, social, and institutional context in various countries. The GGP research program was initiated in 2000 by the UNECE Population Unit to deepen the understanding of demographic changes and appropriately reform social policies in member countries. Since 2009, the GGP has been coordinated by the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI).

The consolidation of GGP activities has strengthened its position in the international scientific community, earning recognition from the prestigious European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) in 2016. This allowed the GGP to be included in ESFRI in 2020 and continue its development, aiming to achieve ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) status by 2027.

In the first edition of the GGS, which lasted until 2015, 19 countries, mainly European, participated. In the second edition, which began in 2020, countries outside Europe also joined. The information collected provides a unique source of knowledge about how family life is changing in different countries around the world. Poland participated in the first edition of the GGS, conducting two waves of the survey (2011, 2014). Participation in the second edition of the GGS is enabled by the project "GGP-PL: Generations and Families," which aims to conduct research from 2024-2028. Its funding is provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education's program "Support for the participation of Polish research teams in international research infrastructure projects."

The ongoing project also includes activities aimed at increasing the use of this program's data in our country. This helps keep Poland in the mainstream of international social research, and additional project goals include increasing the competencies of the Polish scientific community in using collected panel data and promoting its use among non-academic stakeholders.