The main aim of the present paper is to historically reappraise the development of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) in the 1990s after the first six waves had been collected. This development was closely connected to the opening of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the fall of...

To the best of our knowledge, most of the few methodological studies which analyze the impact of faked interviews on survey results are based on "artificial fakes" generated by project students in a "laboratory environment". In contrast, panel data provide a unique opportunity to identify data...

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...

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...

Seit den 80er Jahren ist die Zahl jener Personen im erwerbsfähigen Alter, die keiner bezahlten Beschäftigung nachgehen, in (West-) Deutschland deutlich zurückgegangen. Entsprechend ist unter den 18- bis 67-Jährigen der Anteil derjenigen ohne Job gesunken. Dieser Beschäftigungszuwachs fand...

Die vorliegende Studie befasst sich mit der Analyse der Stabilität der Lebenszufriedenheit, auf Basis der Paneldaten des sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP). Benutzt wird das neuartige Konzept der longitudinalen Entropie und so können bereits in der Literatur vorliegende Analysen zur...

After the introduction in Section 2, we very briefly sketch out current theoretical and empirical developments in the social sciences. In our view, they all point in the same direction: toward the acute and increasing need for multidisciplinary longitudinal data covering a wide range of living...