This paper discusses how household panels in general - and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in particular - can serve as reference data for researchers collecting datasets that do not represent the full universe of the population of interest (e.g., through clinical trials, intervention...

With the pilot study Living outside Germany, the longitudinal German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) ventures into completely uncharted methodological territory by attempting to locate the addresses of former participants in the German household panel study SOEP who have since immigrated...

The definition and operationalization of wealth information in population surveys and the corresponding microdata requires a wide range of more or less normative assumptions. However, the decisions made in both the pre- and post-data-collection stage may interfere considerably with the...

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...

This paper provides a statistical overview of three new cognitive ability measures collected in wave 12 of the HILDA Survey: (i) Backwards Digit Span; (ii) the Symbol Digits Modalities Test; and (iii) a 25-item version of the National Adult Reading Test. The paper: analyses willingness 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...

Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can...

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the...

The Mahabub Hossain Panel Data (MHPD) was initiated in 1988 and maintained by and named after the late Dr. Mahabub Hossain, a well-known agricultural and development economist who led a number of reputed organizations in Bangladesh (Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies and BRAC) and in...

In the 2008 Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) Pretest, the factorial survey method was tested for the first time for use in the SOEP longitudinal study. In this paper, we describe the construction and application of the vignette module, which has its origins in the field of justice research and...