Report of December 19, 2012
In Spring 2013, an important expansion of the SOEP core samples will take place. For the third time in the history of the SOEP, a subsample will be added that consists solely of households with t least one household member of foreign origin.
In the first survey wave of 1984, subsample B was launched: this sample of individuals from five southern European countries was obtained from public registry offices. In 1945/95, immigrant sample was added to reflect the dynamics of immigration to Germany in the years following 1984.
The planned immigration sample differs significantly from the two previous foreigner/immigrant samples, both in size and in sample design. The size, at a planned 3,000 households, is significantly igher than that of past subsamples. This is made possible through SOEP’s cooperation with the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg. This cooperation makes it possible to use the Integrated Employment Biographies (IEB) database of the Federal Employment Agency as the sampling frame. The high case number is made possible by the IAB’s contribution to financing and to the design of the immigration sample.
As we are currently in the process of assessing a proposal by TNS Infratest to conduct the fieldwork, we will report in detail on the planned study in our SOEPnewsletter 100 and introduce the disproportionally weighted nationalities.