LabFam

🌷

At LabFam, we look at fertility from every angle—demographics, economics, social norms, policy… and yes, occasionally, the magic of a long spring weekend.

While many are busy hunting for chocolate eggs, we can’t help but notice the many modalities of fertility in action:

📊 demographic – timing and number of births

💼 economic – jobs, stability, and opportunity

🏡 social – partnerships, family life, and shared moments

🌱 seasonal – because there’s something about spring that sparks new beginnings

Here’s to a weekend that celebrates life in all its forms: family, friends, and maybe even a little introspection. May it bring warmth, joy, and the kind of slow moments that help balance work, family, and everything in between.

Happy Easter from LabFam! 🐣

🎄 Time for ... Season’s Greetings from LabFam ✨

As the year comes to a close, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude to our community of researchers, collaborators, and colleagues. Your curiosity, engagement, and commitment to open and rigorous science inspire us every day.

The holiday season can be joyful, but it can also be a challenging time for many — for those experiencing loss, those without family, or those facing circumstances beyond their control. Some may choose not to celebrate, and however you spend this season, we hope you find moments of comfort, connection, and reflection.

We are deeply grateful for the shared pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and we look forward to another year of meaningful discoveries, collaboration, and insight into the lives and families we study.

Wishing you peace, reflection, and gentle joy this season,

The Team 🎁📊

🎄 A Christmas gift for the life-course research community 🎁🎙️

This festive season, we are delighted to share a podcast episode introducing LabFam Individual Biographies (LIB) — an open science research infrastructure designed to make comparative life-course research easier, richer, and fully reproducible.

🔍 What is LIB?

LIB transforms longitudinal panel data into harmonized, spell-based life-course histories, moving beyond point-in-time interviews to continuous trajectories with clear start and end dates. It covers three core domains:

👶 Fertility histories

💍 Partnership histories

💼 Employment histories

This structure makes LIB especially powerful for event-history analysis, timing and sequencing of life events, and studying interactions between family dynamics and labor market careers.

🌍 What does LIB offer researchers?

Comparable life-course data across countries

Lower entry barriers to complex longitudinal analyses

Fully open-source R code for transparency and reproducibility

Flexible configuration: countries, domains, time windows, output formats

Integration with the Comparative Panel File (CPF) for enriched analyses

📊 Data coverage

LIB currently harmonizes data from five major panel studies:

Germany (SOEP), Switzerland (SHP), UK (BHPS/UKHLS), USA (PSID), and Australia (HILDA), spanning life courses from the late 1960s to the early 2020s.

📌 Important: LIB does not redistribute microdata. Researchers access the original surveys through official providers, while LIB supplies the code to construct harmonized biographies.

🎧 In the podcast, we talk about the idea behind LIB, its scientific potential, and practical use, as well as the journey from concept to a fully implemented and validated infrastructure. https://youtu.be/XA0qn3gC3lc

👥 LIB team:

Ewa Weychert · Beata Osiewalska. · Lucas van der Velde · Anna Matysiak. As the year comes to an end, we hope LIB will serve as a meaningful gift to the research community — supporting collaboration, openness, and new insights into how lives unfold over time.

✨ Happy holidays and happy researching!

🎄📊

LabFam Individual Biographies: open science project that harmonizes family and employment histories LabFam Individual Biographies (LIB) is an open science research infrastructure that provides harmonized, spell-based family and employment life-course histor...

Congratulations Anna Matysiak !