SOEP Research: Subjective Well-Being, Personality, Health

Within-Nation Variation in War Exposure and Psychological and Physical Adjustment

Extensive evidence suggests that war-related trauma negatively affects health, yet its long-term and transgenerational effects on psychological and physical adjustment remain poorly understood. This study examines whether individuals who experienced greater war exposure in early childhood—specifically variation in bombardment intensity across German municipalities during the Second World War—show lower, ...

The Value of Care: Brokering Work Conditions and Wages within a Transnational Care System

This article explains how the triadic brokering system in the European Union affects the conditions of work and pay of mobile care workers. Using original survey data gathered from Polish care workers in Germany, the authors found that workers earn less money the more hours they work. Based on qualitative interviews with care workers and representatives of labor market intermediaries, they argue that ...

Labor Market Entry Dynamics and Mental Health Outcomes among Young People with and without Disability

Young people with disability face significant barriers to stable employment. Yet, little is known about how early labor market experiences shape their long-term mental health. This study examines associations between early career insecurity and subsequent mental health trajectories, focusing on disability status as a key axis of inequality. We use nationally representative longitudinal data from the ...

The biological trace of public health policies: how Medicaid improved epigenetic aging in adolescence

Public health insurance for U.S. children has expanded dramatically through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), yet the biological mechanisms linking these policies to long-run health remain poorly understood. We test whether childhood eligibility for Medicaid/CHIP causally affects epigenetic aging measures. Using longitudinal epigenetic data from the Fragile Families and...

The Rise in Absenteeism in 2022 Is Only Partly Due to Electronic Sick Notes

In Germany, employee absences due to illness rose sharply, particularly in 2022. Various sources argue that the introduction of the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU) caused this. Official data previously did not include absences that were not reported to health insurance providers; since the introduction of the eAU, this is no longer the case. This gap does not exist in Socio-Economic ...

How a Mismatch Between Actual and Desired Fertility Relates to Well-Being Across Adulthood

Introduction Most people want two or more children, but many do not realize their fertility desires. At the same time, recent studies suggest that up to 15% of parents regret having children. To investigate how fertility mismatch relates to well-being (i.e., affect balance, life satisfaction, family life satisfaction, and work satisfaction), this preregistered study used nationally representative cross-sectional ...

Mapping Life Satisfaction Over the First Years of Cohabitation Among Former Singles Living Alone in UK and Germany

Objective: As social norms and relationship dynamics evolve, it is important to examine how transitions from singlehood to partnership, cohabitation, and marriage relate to well-being Method: Using data from two large panel studies in the UK and Germany (1984–2019), we identified N = 27,459 individuals who reported being single and living alone at least once. Analyses focused on a subset (N = 1103; ...

Personality in the Classroom: Interactions of Parental SES and Students’ Big Five in Predicting School Performance

While socioeconomic status (SES) and personality have both been identified as relevant predictors of academic achievement, little is known about their possible interplay in predicting school performance. The present study used the latent moderated structural equations (LMS) method to investigate latent interactions between familial SES and parent-rated Big Five in a sample of German high school students ...

Dynamic Networks of Social Contact, Social Desire, and Affect Across Time Scales

Social relationships are central to well-being because they fulfill social affiliation needs. To explain how social needs are regulated, theories describe daily-life processes among social desire, social contact, and affect. Still, these processes remain empirically underexplored because of their complexity. In this study, we estimated multivariate associations of social desire and affect with social ...

Stress and Resilience in the Labor Market