About SOEP

The SOEP Service Group



SOEP Quicklinks:    

SOEPinfo

SOEPlit

SOEPnewsletter

SOEPmonitor

SOEPdata Documents

SOEPdata FAQ

Short Description

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is a wide-ranging representative longitudinal study of private households, located at the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW Berlin. Every year, there were nearly 11,000 households, and more than 20,000 persons sampled by the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung.

The data provide information on all household members, consisting of Germans living in the Old and New German States, Foreigners, and recent Immigrants to Germany. The Panel was started in 1984.

Some of the many topics include household composition, occupational biographies, employment, earnings, health and satisfaction indicators.

 


Services of the Research Data Center SOEP

  • SOEP data are disseminated in several formats on one DVD, accompanied by extensive documentation (also available on our documentation sites), both as raw data and in SAS, STATA and SPSS formats.Geo-Code context data can also be accessed at DIW Berlin. Training workshops for SOEP users are held annually in Germany and abroad.
  • A remote access to sensitive regional data in the SOEP data set.
  • The interactive program SOEPinfo provides information on all SOEP variables as well as data extraction programs.
  • All registered users and interested persons receive a SOEPnewsletter with information on the latest developments in SOEP. You can download the newsletter directly or register to be placed on the newsletter mailing list.
  • For information and discussion we provide two mailinglists, to which you may subscribe yourself.
  • The SOEPlit database allows to search publications based on SOEP data.
  • SOEPmonitor are data series with classification numbers for labor market, education, income and subjective indicators as well as information about housing conditions.
  • In our discussion papers series SOEPpapers you will find current research results based on SOEP data with various topic tables.
  • The special module PanelWhiz provides users with a collection of STATA/SE add-ons to simplify using SOEP in longitudinal analysis.

 


Organization & Financing

The SOEP Household Panel is a Service Unit of the Leibniz Association (WGL) and is located at DIW Berlin. TNS Infratest Sozialforschung (Munich) carries out the fieldwork. Thereof the SOEP group of researchers not only make the data available to the research community in a more userfriendly way, but also conduct their own analyses of the data.

  • Heads of the SOEP: Prof. Dr. Gert G. Wagner (on leave), Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schupp

SOEP was founded in 1983 as a project of Special Research Area 3 (Sfb 3), "Microanalytical Basis of Social Politics", at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main and Mannheim. The director of SOEP up to 1988 was Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Krupp, who as President of DIW Berlin and member of the SfB3 gave home to SOEP at DIW Berlin.
In 1989 Gert G. Wagner assumed Hans-Jürgen Krupp's office. During this time of leading the SOEP, he teached at several universities, since 2002 he is professor at the Berlin University of Technology (TUB). In the beginning of 2011, Gert G. Wagner was appointed to serve as Chairman of the Executive Board of the DIW Berlin for the next almost two years. First Joachim Frick and Jürgen Schupp took over as Interim Heads of the SOEP during this period. After the death of Joachim Frick in December 2011, Jürgen Schupp holds this positon.

From 1990 to 2002, SOEP was funded through the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), partly supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research . As a Service Unit of the Leibniz Association, SOEP now receives continued funding through the Joint Science Conference (GWK, former Bund-Länder Commission for Educational Planning and Research Promotion) by the Federal Government and the State of Berlin.