This paper concentrates on official statistics on household income, poverty, and wealth. It characterizes the main research questions in this field, and it presents an overview of the available statistics and Scientific Use Files produced by the four Research Data Centers (RDC) in Germany. (RDC...

The next tool for social science experimentation should allow for macro level, generalizable, scientific research. In the past devices such as rat mazes, Petri dishes and supercolliders have been developed when scientists needed new tools to do research. We believe that Virtual Worlds are the...

International migration of people is a momentous and complex phenomenon. Research on its causes and consequences, requires sufficient data. While some datasets are available, the nature of migration complicates their scientific use. Virtually no existing dataset captures international migration...

Dieser Beitrag stellt die seit 2000 in Schmollers Jahrbuch / Journal of Applied Social Science Studies erscheinende Artikelserie European Data Watch vor. Die Beiträge zu dieser Serie stellen Datensätze für Personen und Firmen vor, die von empirisch arbeitenden Wirtschafts- und...

In recent years, considerable progress has been made in improving the data infrastructure for fertility and morality researchers in Germany. Several large scale data sets have been made available through the research data centers: the micro-censuses of the 1970s and 1980s, the censuses of the...

Paradata – data about the process of survey production – have drawn increasing attention as the statistical world moves towards the implementation of quality metrics and measures to improve quality and save costs. This paper gives examples of various uses of paradata and discusses access to...

Subjective indicators have been proven to possess predictive power for a large array of social and economic outcomes. However, most of these measures face serious psychometric shortcomings, namely that the items used are not psychometrically investigated. Further, for the assessment of one and...

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is...

In this comment on Henrich et al. (2010) I argue that the right choice of subject pool is intimately linked to the research question. At least within economics, students are often the perfect subject pool for answering some fundamental research questions. Student subject pools can provide an...