Population surveys around the world face the problem of declining cooperation and participation rates of respondents. Not only can item nonresponse and unit nonresponse impair important outcome measures for inequality research such as total household disposable income; there is also a further...

This study examines the phenomenon of nonresponse in the first wave of a refresher sample (subsample H) of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Our first step is to link additional (commercial) microgeographic data on the immediate neighborhoods of the households visited by...

Social security entitlements are a substantial source of wealth that grows in importance over the individual's lifecycle. Despite its quantitative relevance, social security wealth has been thus far omitted from wealth inequality analyses. In Germany, it is the lack of adequate micro data that...

Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people's opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological...

The SOEP Group currently is preparing in addition to increasing the size of the core SOEP, to establish a new Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). This will be established for the period 2012 to 2017 (with a cumulative number of presumably N=5,000 households). Now, in the year 2012, a new subsample is...

Statistical Analysis in surveys is generally facing missing data. In longitudinal studies for some missing values there might be past or future data points available. The question arises how to successfully transform this advantage into improvedimputation strategies. In a simulation study the...

Background: The National Cohort (Nationale Kohorte = NaKo) will be one of the largest cohort studies in Europe to include intensive physical examinations and extensive information about the socio-demographic background and behavior of the subjects. However, regional selectivity of the study and...

The results of a resurvey of non-respondents to the SOEP study carried out in 2006 show that this special effort of reinterviewing was relatively ineffective in two respects. First, the rate of successful conversions of passive to active respondents was low (less than 20 percent). Second, the...

Well-being development at the end of life is often characterized by steep deteriorations, but individual differences in these terminal declines are substantial and not yet well understood. This study moved beyond the typical consideration of health predictors and explored the role of social...

The aim of the project SOEP-RV is to link data from participants in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey to their individual Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) records. For all SOEP respondents who give explicit consent to record linkage, SOEP-RV creates a linked...