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SOEP2008 25 waves special

SOEP2008 Conference - Special Session "25 Waves of SOEP"

This special session will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the SOEP by highlighting the power of this long-running household panel database for both national and cross-national research.

We will first acknowledge Infratest Sozialforschung Munich's outstanding effort in collecting and maintaining this high quality data set. Bernhard von Rosenbladt, the executive director of Infratest and head of the SOEP team at Infratest, from SOEP's birth until last year, will discuss some of the most interesting issues he encountered in his longstanding work with the SOEP survey.

One of the core issues of the SOEP was, and still is, the measurement of incomes and economic welfare. High-quality data on effective household incomes are a crucial prerequisite for social reporting and social policy-oriented research, on both a national and international level. However, after 25 years of experience in data collection, economic analysis, and social reporting on income, what we have learned is that accurate measurement of income still remains a challenging task, leaving many open questions for future research.
Richard Hauser has been invited to speak on the importance of the SOEP for social reporting and social policy in Germany, in particular concerning trends in income inequality and poverty. Richard V. Burkhauser has been invited to speak on the importance of the SOEP as part of the network of long-running household panel studies that have permitted a new generation of researchers to look at issues of income inequality and economic mobility from a cross-national perspective.

The increasing power of a long-running household panel can be demonstrated in particular from a life course perspective on educational attainment. With a growing number of children born in the SOEP reaching the age of personal interviewing and even becoming parents themselves, the SOEP is able to provide rich and unique data for the analysis of the life course and intergenerational inequalities. We have invited Heike Solga to reflect on the actual and potential power of the SOEP data for educational research, particularly against the background of the currently planned "National Education Panel Study" (NEPS).


Schedule of the Session

Chair: Gisela Trommsdorff, University Konstanz

9.00 Bernhard von Rosenbladt, Infratest Munich
25 Years of Collecting SOEP Data

9.30 Richard Hauser, University Frankfurt
The Role of the SOEP for Social Reporting and Social Policy in Germany: Poverty and Income Inequality

10.00 Richard V. Burkhauser, Cornell University
The Role of the SOEP for Cross-National Comparative Research: Income Inequality and Economic Mobility

10.30 Heike Solga, WZB Berlin and FU Berlin
Education in Intra- and Intergenerational Perspective - How Poor Would Education Research Be Without the German SOEP?

11.00 End of Session

 


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