Children adopt unhealthy adult food patterns at the latest by the age of four. This critical food and health behaviour acquired in childhood and youth has a considerable impact on adult disease and mortality rates. Consequently, a decision to adopt healthy eating habits will have a positive...

The concept of the life styles has gained important meaning in many facets in social sciences in the course of the last century. Worked out at first on the basis of the hermeneutic tradition of the social sciences, it was backed up increasingly in the last three decades by empiric cluster...

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004)prediction that individuals'reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference income is not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

Clustering individuals or households on the basis of socio-economic variables has become a widespread practice in German social research over the past few decades. This paper is part of a research project that explores results which may be obtained when time use patterns are chosen as the basis...

This paper analyzes the impact of job insecurity perceptions on individual well-being. While previous studies on the subject have used the concept of perceived job insecurity rather arbitrarily, the present analysis explicitly takes into account individual perceptions about both the likelihood...

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004) prediction that individuals' reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference incomeis not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

This paper analyzes the impact of job insecurity perceptions on individual well-being. In contrast to previous studies, we explicitly take into account perceptions about both the likelihood and the potential costs of job loss and demonstrate that most contributions to the literature suffer from...

Using data from national socio-economic panel surveys in Australia, Britain and Germany, this paper analyzes the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that, in all three countries, preferences and choices relating to life goals/values,...

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...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...