Using a research design that traces siblings preferences for postmaterialistic values in Germany over two decades, this paper provides new evidence on the origins of value preferences. Focusing on Inglehart's thesis of value change, we test the combined socialization and scarcity hypothesis...

While some scholars interpret the frequently documented association between age and the strength of party identification as evidence of accumulated political learning, others stress the importance of critical life stages. Germany's turbulent last century, with its suspensions of democratic...

The computation of cross sectional weights in household panels is challenging because household compositions change over time. Sampling probabilities of new household entrants are generally not known and assigning them zero weight is not satisfying. Two common approaches to cross sectional...

In household panels, typically all household members are surveyed. Because household composition changes over time, so-called following rules are implemented to decide whether to continue surveying household members who leave the household (e.g. former spouses/partners, grown children) in...

Web surveys technically allow providing feedback to respondents based on their previous responses. This personalized feedback may not only be used to target follow-up questions, it also allows test results to be returned immediately to respondents. This paper argues that the possibility of...

In recent years, an increasing number of nationally representative surveys in the social sciences and economics have implemented the Big Five model of personality. While many personality inventories were originally developed in the context of self-administered questionnaires, they are often used...

Like many medical studies, the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is based on a non-random "convenience sample" of self-recruited participants. To study processes of selectivity in BASE-II, we used an identical questionnaire to compare BASE-II with a large, representative reference study, the...

The paper gives an overview of two experiments implemented in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) considering the effect of monetary incentives on cross-sectional and longitudinal response propensities. We conclude that the overall effects of monetary incentives on response rates are positive...

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...