The overarching goal of the cross-national and cross-professional project is a longitudinal survey of the study and career choice motives of teacher training students, as well as their attitudes and perceptions regarding the teaching profession. The study uses method triangulation (combining several methods, in this case both quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods in different sub-projects).

At the beginning and end of the degree programme, a standardised questionnaire (an internationally validated survey instrument from the FIT Choice Questionnaire (Watt and Richardson, 2007; German version: König, Rothland, Darge, Lünnemann and Tachtsoglou, 2013) is used to determine career choice motives.

The methodological setting will be expanded as part of the mixed methods through qualitative interviews with the Passau sample from the 5th semester of study (i.e. approximately in the middle of the programme). The design of the interviews is based on the results of the quantitative surveys. In this way, quantitative results from the questionnaire survey can be enriched with insights from in-depth interviews with qualitative data, thus enabling causal explanations of changes in motivations and attitudes.

Universities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Africa and Israel are involved in the study. In addition, a sub-project is dealing with the career choice motivation of students of nursing education in Austria.