Most studies of assortative marriage still rely on cross-sectional data and apply log-linear modeling of the contingency table of wives’ and husbands’ educational levels. However, these macro studies have provided quite ambiguous findings and interpretations. In comparison, the life course approach analyzes single individuals over the life course and explicitly recognizes the dynamic nature of partner decisions and the importance of educational roles and institutional circumstances. Based on life course studies, educational homogamy seems to be driven by three factors: (a) Individuals often prefer to associate with equally educated partners; (b) educational expansion increases contact opportunities for equally educated men and women at an age when young people start to look for partners and form couples; and (c) women's changing economic role in dual-earner societies increases the importance of women's education and labor force attachment.

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Education in modern societies has become a lifelong process. That is why the principles of life-course research, as stated by Glen H. Elder, are of utmost significance in empirical education research: (1) focusing on long-term educational processes over the individual lifespan;(2) considering individual educational pathways within their institutional and social embeddedness (e.g., within not only formal educational institutions but also nonformal/informal contexts such as the family, peer groups, and other social networks); (3) analyzing decision-making processes in education connected with the idea of agency as well as of planning, creative, and selfdetermining actors; (4) investigating the time structure and timing of educational events and transitions and the consequences they have for the subsequent educational pathways and educational chances; (5) conceptionally differentiating age, cohort, and period effects. This chapter discusses the importance of these five principles for the conception, the design, and the possibilities for analysis of the German National Educational Panel Study. In the context of these principles, we formulate methodological advantages of longitudinal data on educational processes that can be attained within the National Educational Panel Study. In particular, panel data improve the opportunities to describe trajectories of growth and development over the life course and to study the patterns of causal relationships over longer time spans.