SOEP in the College Classroom

You are very wellcome to use the SOEP data for teaching.

However, due to data-protection laws, only a maximum of 50% of all cases may be used. This selection is easily chosen with the help of the Random-Group-Variable, which separates the data set into 20 subsamples. The variable RGROUP20, which can be found in the dataset CIRDEF, has exactly 20 values. Only cases with values from 11 to 20 may be used for teaching purposes.

If you are allowed to use the full data set, you can generate the teaching version yourself: On the DVD under ‘data\soep\teaching\' you can find an adequate program, that will create the 50% teaching version within half an hour. The program is available for SPSS, STATA and SAS, which can create the teaching version from the installed original data.
For data protection reasons, students in the classroom are on no account allowed to have access to the data of Random-Groups 1-10 (if you use the 95% subsample, then no case will have the value 1). Access to the original data-set is naturally also prohibited.
The ‘teaching-data-set' for your students should be installed on a separate disk area, access to which is controlled by the contract holder. Students are naturally not allowed to take any data home or to install it ‘anywhere' within the university.

Please note that from a data protection perspective the contract holder is responsible for strict adherence to data protection! She/he should therefore make sure that all students, as well as colleagues are legally bound to data protection laws.

This information as pdf file | PDF, 380.38 KB .

Downloadable reduced SOEP data set for training purposes in stata format 

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