Programs of excellence

Piloté par l’Ined depuis 2011, iPOPs figure parmi les cent lauréats de l’appel d’offres « Laboratoires d’excellence ». Il explore les dynamiques familiales, le vieillissement, les inégalités sociales et territoriales. Il s’appuie sur un réseau interuniversitaire et interdisciplinaire. Il associe les universités de Bordeaux, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris-Nanterre, Strasbourg et l’université Paris Cité et vise à renforcer la formation des étudiants, le transfert et l’expertise en recherche. 

De plus, le Labex iPOPs mène une politique d’accueil en délégation d’enseignants-chercheurs pour une période de six mois à un an. Ce dispositif étant appelé à disparaître avec la fin du Labex en décembre 2026, l’Ined étudie actuellement des alternatives avec ses partenaires pour poursuivre les collaborations engagées.

The LifeObs project won a call for proposals for research-structuring infrastructures (EquipEx+) and was launched in 2021. It is a national observatory of life trajectories that brings together the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), University Paris Dauphine-PSL, the universities of Strasbourg and Bordeaux, together with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) by way of another infrastructure: PROGEDO. By organizing and structuring collection and analysis of data on life trajectories, LifeObs also further improves France’s leading position for international surveys. The scientific repercussions of LifeObs are already considerable, and the observatory is gradually being recognized as a reference instrument for public policymaking, the media, and civil society. Several major national surveys are currently being conducted in this framework, covering all stages of the life cycle from childhood to old age.

Three of those surveys have since been integrated into some of the most important European-level infrastructure programs: the Generations and Gender Program (GGP2020), the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and GUIDE (Growing up in Digital Europe)/EuroCohort, the first pan-European child cohort study. In 2024, two major general population surveys were conducted using LifeObs: the “Study of Family and Intergenerational Relations 2”, a component of the international Generations and Gender Program surveys (GGP) and “Families and Employers 2,” a component of the FamEmp longitudinal survey.

The LifeObs infrastructure is also used to launch innovative projects that will improve our apprehension of emerging behaviors and the development of new indicators. One such project is INED’s ENVIE study on the affective life of young adults; first findings from the survey were published in 2024.

The RE-CO-NAI research platform is used in two national programs on child cohorts followed from birth, both launched in 2011:

the French Longitudinal Study of Children (ELFE), which follows over 18,000 children born in 2011 up to their 20th year;

the Epidemiology of Premature Births study (Epipage 2), which concerns over 7,800 premature babies followed up to age 12.

The RE-CO-NAI platform, coordinated by the INED-hosted ELFE research team—an institutionally mixed team composed of researchers from INED, INSERM, and the French Blood Transfusion Agency (EFS)—provides access to a massive amount of related data collected for the ELFE and Epipage 2 cohorts. These social, demographic, and health-related data are collected by way of surveys of the cohort children’s families, together with surveys of those children’s doctors, who have been key in setting up regular health check-ups and biological material collection. 

The Graduate School of Demography (HED), which has been awarded PIA funding, is a graduate research network that involves both INED and University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne are implicated, with INED in charge of the PhD training program. The school is also supported by the universities of Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Paris-Nanterre, Paris Saclay, Paris Cité, and Picardie, together with eight doctoral schools and ten research units. HED offers what is in France a new approach to training in research, from the master’s level forward.

Moreover, every academic year HED funds a student who, after completing a Master’s 2 program, is then selected by the European Doctoral School of Demography for admission to its comprehensive demographer training program. 
 

L’École universitaire de recherche Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSST) est un programme de formation soutenu par un partenariat entre l’EHESS et l’Ined. Lauréate de l’appel à projets « Écoles universitaires de recherche » du PIA3 en 2019, elle propose un cursus allant du master au doctorat, adossé à six laboratoires de recherche : le CEMS, le CeSOR, le CESSP, le CMH, le CRH et l’IRIS.

Elle forme des chercheurs et enseignants-chercheurs, ainsi que des professionnels engagés dans la promotion de l’égalité entre les sexes et la lutte contre les discriminations. Outre l’ethnographie et le travail sur archives, la formation accorde une place centrale à l’analyse statistique, envisagée comme un outil d’objectivation particulièrement efficace pour appréhender les rapports de genre et de sexualité dans l’ensemble des dynamiques sociales. Les étudiants, doctorants et chercheurs de l’EHESS et de l’Ined peuvent bénéficier, dans le cadre de cette EUR, d’un fonds d’appui destiné à soutenir les travaux des doctorants et enseignants-chercheurs.

L'EUR s’appuie sur 8 autres partenaires : l’École Normale Supérieure, le CNRS, l’EHESS, l’École des Ponts ParisTech, INRAE, l’Université Paris 1, le CEPII, le Cepremap.L’unité de démographie économique de l’Ined participe à l’EUR PGSE (Paris Graduate School of Economics), coordonnée par PSE-Ecole d’Economie de Paris. 

L’EUR est structurée autour de trois domaines majeurs : la recherche, l’enseignement et la dissémination et l’expertise, et de huit axes thématiques. Dans ce cadre, les membres de l’unité de recherche « Démographie économique » de l’Ined participent activement à l’organisation et aux activités de l’axe « Économie publique, économie du travail et économie démographique ».

These institutes aim to structure research at a limited number of centers endowed with great multidisciplinary strengths in order to meet current social and economic challenges and respond to certain lines of questioning in the scientific community.

INED is partner of the Collaborative Research Institute on Migration (ICM), founded in 2018.

ICM aims to structure and lead research on migration by drawing on the concentrated scientific strengths represented on Campus Condorcet. Several INED researchers have been selected as ICM fellows, thereby bolstering scientific collaboration between our two structures.
 

INED, together with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS); IFREMER, a French research institute dedicated to extending our knowledge about the ocean; the National Institute for Digital Science and Technology Research (INRIA); the University of Paris; the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO); and the IDDRI Research Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations are all partners in the project, which is led by Sciences Po.

The aim is to affirm the contribution the social and human sciences (SHS) make to scientific excellence and the need for those contributions; the method is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding environmental and digital transitions that encompasses their political, social, economic, legal, and cultural consequences; specifically, public policies and regulation, the monitoring and steering of change and their impacts, democratic decision-making processes, controversies, the position of scientific discourse, and other issues. 
 

AURELIA, co-run by INED and the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM), brings together an international research team from ten organizations: the French School of Public Health (EHESP), the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), the IRES economic and social research institute, the French Social Work School of Paris (IRTS), the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Hamburg (UH), the Life Risk Research Center of Japan’s Doshisha University (DU), and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

The project has 3 objectives:

•    to analyze tensions between assistance norms and practices, 
•    to analyze tensions between the national, regional, and individual scales when it comes to regulation and concrete assistance to dependent persons, 
•    to interpret autonomy support regimes through the analytic lens of attitudes toward instrumentation, in that the instruments in question involve services and organize power relations in a given activity sector and between sectors (capabilities, financial resources, obligations, information, and so forth). Concretely, the project focuses on the instruments used to assess autonomy, on doctrines of rehabilitation, but also on instruments for compensating autonomy loss. 

The KAPPA project, run by INED, is supported by a consortium of eight French research organizations—the University of Grenoble-Alps (UGA), the University of Lille (UDL), the the French School of Public Health (EHESP), University Paris-East Créteil (UPEC), the Paris School of Economics (PSE), University of Paris Cité (UPC), the Institute for Research and Information in Health Economics (IRDES), the ministerial Department of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics-Statistical (DREES) survey of assisted living facilities—and three medical-social advocacy groups: Handéo, for disabled persons; AHREK, an association for physiotherapy research; and UNASSAD, an disability/dependence assistance, care, and home services association.  

The aim is to develop a body of scientific knowledge for describing concrete ways of a possible convergence or unification of disability and old-age related dependence policies, and what such convergence would imply. The method is to probe the origins, implications, and development prospects of segmenting the two types by age in a retrospective, current and future perspective using a comparative approach and multiscale analysis. 
 

INNOVCARE is coordinated by the EHESS France-Japan Fondation. The aim is to develop an alternative concept called “care-driven innovation.” The method is French and Japanese multidisciplinary collaboration within and between the human and social sciences and and including those of medicine and technological engineering. This project offers an entirely new comparative perspective on France and Japan that involves nearly 20 research institutions while drawing on longstanding collaboration between several French and Japanese members of a consortium of 18 institutions,11 of them French and 7 of them Japanese.  

The HILAUSENIORS project examines the way housing and environment can help maintain autonomy over time as people age. It starts with an inquiry into what housing that has been designed specifically for retirees might contribute. By comparing the level of autonomy of older persons living in “intermediate” housing (defined as housing that combines characteristics of a private home with those of an assisted living facility) to the situation of retirees living in standard private homes, HILAUSENIORS study will be able provide answers to these questions, questions of considerable importance for the development of future intermediate housing structures.