Up to now in the social sciences, what is known as citizen science—the involvement of interested citizens in scientific surveys—has been used relatively little as a method of empirical social research. While the “citizens’ dialogues” that are becoming more widespread in politics can be...

This paper presents the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), an intuitive procedure aimed at measuring risk attitudes. Subjects decide how many boxes to collect out of 100, one of which containing a bomb. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes accumulated but are zero if the bomb is...

This paper shows that there are severe measurement errors regarding the occupational affiliations in the German Socio-Economic Panel. These errors are traced back to the survey structure: in years where occupational information is gathered from the entire employed population instead of only from...

This paper analyzes the determinants of annual worker reallocation across disaggregated occupations in western Germany for the period 1985-2003. Employing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the pattern of average occupational mobility is documented. Worker reallocation is found to be...

Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents' objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local...

The Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is a multidisciplinary study that allows for the investigation of how a multitude of health status factors as well as many other social and economic outcomes interplay. The sample consists of 1,600 participants aged 60 to 80, and 600 participants aged 20 to...

The Motivational Theory of Life-Span Development (MTD) identifies motivational and self-regulatory strategies that people use to meet the challenges they face throughout life. The theory distinguishes control strivings related to goal engagement from those related to goal disengagement and goal...

This paper describes key characteristics of SOEP users, measures their satisfaction with SOEP service, and studies their habits in the use of the SOEP data. The analysis is based primarily on data from the SOEP user surveys conducted in 2004, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Older user surveys (in the...

This paper describes the implementation of a factorial survey within the SOEP-Pretest of 2008 and investigates (1) respondents' comments about the vignettes, (2) interviewers' assessments of respondents comprehension and willingness to answer, and (3) response behavior regarding response time,...

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper develops fast algorithms for jackknifing inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is independent of the...