The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study is a wide-ranging representative longitudinal study of private households, located at the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW Berlin. Every year, there were nearly 11,000 households, and more than 20,000 persons sampled by the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung. The data provide information on all household members, consisting of Germans living in the Old and New German States, foreigners, and recent immigrants to Germany. The Panel was started in 1984. Some of the many topics include household composition, occupational biographies, employment, earnings, health and satisfaction indicators. As early as June 1990—even before the Economic, Social and Monetary Union—SOEP expanded to include the states of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), thus seizing the rare opportunity to observe the transformation of an entire society. An immigrant sample was added as well to account for the changes that took place in German society in 1994/95. Further new samples were added in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2011, and 2012. The survey is constantly being adapted and developed in response to current social developments. The international version contains 95% of all cases surveyed.
Title: Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), Data from 1984-2012
DOI: 10.5684/soep.v29.1
Collection period: 1984-2012
Publication date: March 20, 2014
Principal investigators: Jürgen Schupp, Martin Kroh, Jan Goebel, Simone Bartsch, Marco Giesselmann, Markus Grabka, Peter Krause, Elisabeth Liebau, David Richter, Christian Schmitt, Daniel Schnitzlein, Frauke Peter, Ingrid Tucci
You can see the complete information by clicking at the DOI of the original data set http://dx.doi.org/10.5684/soep.v29
Data set information:
| Number of units | 79,199 |
| Number of variables | 513 in 6 data sets |
| Data format | STATA, SPSS, SAS, CSV |
| MD5 fingerprints of the data sets |
Stata German+English | TXT, 268 Byte |
Publications using this file should refer to the above DOI Find an explanation on the usage of DOI here.and cite following references
If you do not exclude the cases of the migration samples in your analysis, then please also cite the following reference:
If you do not exclude the cases of the refugee samples in your analysis, please also cite:
If you use data from the SOEP-LEE2 surveys, please also cite:
If you would like to refer more specifically, please also cite:
HGEN
Errors in the imputation of electricity, heating, and additional expenses for tenants in the current data distribution resulted in values that were too high. These errors also affected the generation of rent including maintenance but excluding heating. The variables affected are: electr$$, heat$$, util$$, rent$$, and frent$$ for the years 2008 to 2012.
The variables typ1hh12 and typ2hh12 changed for two households.
BCPKAL
Also in the 2012 survey year, after the suspension of compulsory military service in Germany, the related calendar information in the individual questionnaire was revised. This revision was made in the original individual data for 2012 but not in the corresponding calendar data—these have now been updated retrospectively for the data distribution v29.
Field-de Field-de
Individual 2012: Field-de Field-de
Individual (FiD) 2012: Var-de
Household (PAPI) 2013: Field-de
Household 2012: Field-de Field-de
Household (FiD) 2012: Var-de
Biography 2012: Field-de
Catch-up Individual 2012: Field-de
Catch-Up (FiD) 2012: Var-de
Youth (16-17 year-olds) 2013: Field-de
Youth (16-17 year-olds) 2012: Field-de
Youth (FiD) 2012: Var-de
Mother and Child (Newborns) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Parents 1 (FiD, Newborns) 2012: Var-de
Mother and Child (2-3-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Parents 3 (FiD, 2/3-year-olds) 2012: Var-de
Mother and Child (5-6-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Parents 4 (FiD, 5/6-year-olds) 2012: Var-de
Parents and Child (7-8-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Parents 5 (FiD, 7/8-year-olds) 2012: Var-de
Mother and Child (9-10-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Parents 6 (FiD, 9/10-year-olds) 2012: Var-de
Deceased person 2012: Field-de
Grip Strength 2012: Field-de
Interviewer (PAPI) 2012: Field-de Var-de Var-en
Parents 2 (FiD, Born in 2021) 2012: Var-de
Please find all sample specific questionnaires of this year and all questionnaires of previous years on this site
3) Job submission instructions for the SOEPremote System at DIW Berlin
4) SOEP 2012 – Documentation on Biography and Life History Data for SOEP v29
5) SOEP 2012 – SOEPmonitor Household 1984-2012 (SOEP v29.1)
6) SOEP 2012 – SOEPmonitor Person 1984-2012 (SOEP v29)
7) SOEP 2012 – Methodenbericht zum Befragungsjahr 2012 (Welle 29) des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels
8) SOEP FiD – 'Familien in Deutschland' 2012: Methodenbericht
9) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of the Person-related Meta-dataset PPFAD for SOEP v29
10) SOEP 2012 - Documentation of the Household-related Meta-dataset HPFAD for SOEP v29
11) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of Person-related Status and Generated Variables in PGEN for SOEP v29
12) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of Household-related Status and Generated Variables in HGEN for SOEP v29
14) SOEP 2012 – Documentation on Individual Health Status Variables in HEALTH for SOEP v29
15) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of Person-related Variables on Children in $KIND for SOEP v29
16) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of the Pooled Dataset on Children in $KIDLONG for SOEP v29
17) SOEP 2012 – Methodenbericht zur SOEP-Retrospektiverhebung "Frühe Kindheit im (Nach-)Kriegskontext"
1) Zur Erhebung des adaptiven Verhaltens von zwei- und dreijährigen Kindern im Sozio-oekonomischen Panel (SOEP)
2) Assessing the distributional impact of "imputed rent" and "non-cash employee income" in microdata : Case studies based on EU-SILC (2004) and SOEP (2002)
All documentation for filtering can be found on this page