FORS won the open tender by the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sports to conduct the 2016-17 Swiss Federal Surveys of Adolescents (ch-x), which focuses on the topic of the geographical mobility of young people. ch-x are long-established large-scale surveys conducted amongst 19 to 21-year-old Swiss citizens. They provide virtually full coverage of young men drafted into the army, as well as a sample of women of the same age.
The 2016-17 edition will allow an entire cohort of young men over a two-year period to be examined, as well as a complementary sample of approximately 2,000 women of the same age. Never before has there been a large-scale survey of this nature on the topic of mobility, with a special focus on language, professional and cultural stays in other language areas of Switzerland and abroad. The comprehensiveness of the paper questionnaire (over 100 questions) as well as the number of respondents in the dataset (more than 40,000) result in extremely rich data that will enable significant contributions in the fields of mobility and youth studies.
First results, in the form of a publication for the general public are expected to be released in 2019. Subsequently, the data will be made available to the scientific community for further analysis.
