Data Spotlight #10
As dedicated data curators, we’re excited to showcase curated data collections that will hopefully ignite your research interests. Today we present you:
A New Long-Term Perspective on the Environment and Sustainability –
The GLEN Study
What do people in Germany think about phasing out internal combustion engines, renewable energy, or carbon taxes? The German environmental panel GLEN (German Longitudinal Environmental Study) aims to provide answers to these questions. Launched in 2024, this nationwide long-term study fills an important gap in social science research on the environment and sustainability. This ambitious project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), is designed to run for 12 years.
To this end, researchers from the Universities of Heidelberg, Konstanz, LMU Munich, and RPTU Kaiserslautern are surveying randomly selected citizens aged 18 and older based on a sample from the residents’ registration office. Twice a year—in early summer and winter—participants are surveyed via an online questionnaire or on paper about their attitudes and behaviors. In addition to environmental topics such as mobility, diet, consumption, and climate skepticism, the study also examines the social environment: life satisfaction, media use, leisure activities, and traditional demographic data such as age and education are included in the survey.
The first dataset from the GLEN study has now been published via the GESIS data archive and is immediately available online to researchers. The package contains data from the first five survey waves, which were collected between November 2024 and January 2026. GLEN is part of the GESIS Community Data Collection, which makes data from the scientific community available for research purposes.
GLEN (2026). German Longitudinal Environmental Study (GLEN) (ZA9085; Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. GESIS, Köln. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.14731
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