Forschung SOEP: Survey-Methodologie und Data Science

Transformation des SOEP: Evidenzbasierte Politikberatung für Krisenzeiten

Politische Beratung braucht eine gute und schnell zugängliche Datengrundlage. Beides ist in Krisenzeiten besonders schwer zu bekommen. Was es daher braucht: leistungsfähige, dauerhaft betriebene Dateninfrastrukturen, die im Krisenfall schnell aktiviert und für wissenschaftliche Analysen nutzbar gemacht werden können. Auch die SOEP-Daten-infrastruktur soll besser werden. Ab 2028 beginnt eine Transformation ...

From Cycles to Spirals: Rethinking Longitudinal Survey Design

Longitudinal surveys play a central role in social science research and policy advice but increasing demands for timely data pose substantial challenges for managing time, resources, and data quality across survey waves. While the Survey Life Cycle (SLC) provides a well established framework for organizing survey production, it is primarily geared toward single wave studies and offers limited guidance ...

Navigating Uncertainty: Do Communicable Diseases Influence Risk Preferences?

This paper explores the effect of COVID-19 infection rates on individuals’ risk preferences using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a large population-wide ran¬dom sample. Exploiting county-level variation in a difference-in-differences design, we find that risk preferences remain unchanged: the effect is precisely estimated at 2.1% of a standard deviation (95% CI: [−0.4%, +4.6%]), ruling out economically ...

SOEP-LEE2: Data Updates and New Research Opportunities

The Socio-Economic Panel Linked Employer–Employee Survey, Version 2 (SOEP-LEE2), provides linked information on employees, establishments, and self-employed individuals in Germany. An earlier Data Observer article (Matiaske, Wenzel, Torben Dall Schmidt, Christoph Halbmeier, M. Maas, D. Holtmann, C. Schröder, et al. 2024. “SOEP-LEE2: Linking Surveys on Employees to Employers in Germany.” Jahrbücher ...

Measuring Ambiguity Attitudes Reliably in Surveys

This seminar introduces ambiguity, explains why it matters in economics, and discusses how ambiguity attitudes are typically measured in empirical research. Ambiguity plays an important role in decision-making, as most situations in life involve unknown outcomes or probabilities. However, people’s attitudes toward ambiguity are hard to measure precisely, as standard measures based on incentivized...

Zuverlässige Erfassung der Einstellung gegenüber Mehrdeutigkeit in Umfragen

Der englische Originaltitel des Seminars lautet: “Measuring Ambiguity Attitudes Reliably in Surveys”. Die Präsentation findet auf Englisch statt. Eine kurze Zusammenfassung zum Vortrag ist nur auf der englischen Veranstaltungsseite verfügbar!

SOEP Annual Report 2025

Does Having Daughters Affect Political Preferences? Using Meta-Analytic Tools on Many Surveys

This study investigates whether having daughters impacts political preferences and whether this effect varies across European countries. We estimate effect sizes for 39 countries in the European Social Survey (n = 156,236) and aggregate estimates using random-effects meta-analysis, following a preregistered analysis plan. We find significant evidence that having daughters increases the preference for ...

Introducing Open Data Format: A Platform-Independent, Non-Proprietary, Metadata-Enriched, Multilingual Data Format for Tabular Data

This paper introduces the Open Data Format (ODF), a non-proprietary, metadata-enriched, and zipcompressed data format for tabular data alongside statistical software packages. It embeds structured, multilingual metadata directly within the data file, using the well-established DDI-Codebook standard (DDI Alliance, 2014), and enables access to both data and documentation within common statistical environments. ...

Historical Changes in Control Belief Trajectories

The present research examines whether and how well-documented historical changes in resource availability, social embedding, technology, and social norms also manifest in control beliefs—a key psychological marker of individual health and well-being. Drawing on longitudinal data from five waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (N = 42,158) spanning over 20 years, we analyzed control belief trajectories ...