KEEP-Panel Thuringia: Cognitive development of decision making competencies and societal participation

Funding period 09/2021-08/2024

With the overall aim of encouraging research, the state of Thuringia has contributed around 397,000 Euro for Dr. Tilmann Betsch and Dr. Stefanie Lindow’s project “KEEP-Panel Thüringen”. The project has received 39,000 Euro in additional funding by the University of Erfurt (total funding: approximately 436,000 Euro).

Decision making competencies are a central developmental process and form the foundation for independence and societal participation. Obtain a better understanding of these processes is important from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Decision making in adults has been intensively researched for decades. Still, what developmental processes lead to decision making competence in complex, modern environments? What can be done to facilitate those processes? We aim to identify the factors affecting the cognitive development of decision making competencies in childhood and beyond.

To do so, we aim to create the KEEP-Panel Thüringen consisting of children ages 6 and older. This panel, as a part of Kindermedienland Thüringen and the state-wide strategy to encourage the participation of young people, will support the University of Erfurt, with its focus Education. School. Behavior., in the areas of collaborative research and knowledge transfer. With the help of this project, existing individual research projects at the University of Erfurt will be combined into a collaborative research effort.

The project builds on the findings of the previous DFG-project concerning probabilistic decisions in children. That project, which began in 2013, used cross-sectional, experimental research to examine decision making in children and adults. The KEEP-Panel Thüringen will utilize longitudinal data to obtain insights into the development of decision making competencies while focusing on their effects on subsequent societal participation.