Übersicht Innovationsmodule

Major life events (e.g. divorce) often require considerable adaptation and pose a risk for some people. Yet, many people cope rather well with such events, and some feel even better after wards. In this IS-module, we use in-depths psychological assessments (experience sampling, cognitive assessments) to explain diversity in developmental trajectories.

The adaptive General Ecological Behavior scale (a-GEB) was designed to provide an economic assessment of a person’s propensity to engage in an ecological lifestyle. As such, it is especially useful for promoting sustainable development in science-based policy making. Its construct validity and external validity were previously established for non-adaptive versions (e.g., Kaiser, Byrka, & Hartig, 2010; embargo ended 04/2015).

Anxiety and depression are the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in Germany. The Patient-Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4) is an ultra-short screening instrument that asks for the two core symptoms of both disorders during the previous two weeks. The PHQ-4 is a well-validated instrument with good reliability and criterion validity (Kohlmann et al., 2014).  

Reference:
Kohlmann S, Gierk B, Löwe B (2014). PHQ-4. Patient Health Questionnaire-4. In C.J. Kemper, E. Brähler & M. Zenger (eds.), Psychologische und sozialwissenschaftliche Kurzskalen. Standardisierte Erhebungsinstrumente für Wissenschaft und Praxis. (S. 242-244). Berlin: Medizinisch Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft.

Both respondents and interviewers were asked about their attitudes towards ongoing political and social issues. In addition, information on the mutual perceptions of respondents and interviewers was obtained. The unique database provides new opportunities for investigating the mechanisms underlying the occurrence of interviewer effects in face-to-face surveys.

The respondents’ physical attractiveness is rated by the interviewer on a seven-point scale.

Household decision making with regard to consumption and investment relies on its members’ risk attitudes. The SOEP-IS data collected in this experiment will look at how the individual risk preferences are aggregated in a household and how joint decisions about risky investments are made.

Asking about people’s feelings throughout the day as they go through their lives (experience sampling method, ESM) allows us to get an overall sense of how a person’s life is going by measuring how they feel on a moment-to-moment basis. Further, this allows us to examine how specific day-to-day activities affect quality of life.

To overcome incompleteness in the case of long-list factual questions, a database query was incorporated in the survey procedure. To test different database interfaces, a split-ballot experiment was conducted using the example of educational attainment comparing a dynamic text field, a search tree and a long list.

Children growing up in chaotic homes, i.e. homes characterized by noise, crowding, and a lack of structure are more likely to develop behavioral and other problems. The CHAOS module in the SOEP-IS allows the replication and extension of previous results on the association of home chaos with child development outcomes.

The five-item Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ) is designed to efficiently assess the general propensity to believe in conspiracy theories. The CMQ examines meaningful associations with personality measures, generalized political attitudes (e.g. right-wing authoritarianism), individual differences (e.g. perceived socio-political control), and measurement equivalence across three language versions has already been established.

The goal of this project is to quantify the motivational and self-regulatory strategies people use to meet the challenges they face throughout life. Drawing from the Motivational Theory of Life-Span Development (Heckhausen et al., 2010), we distinguish control strivings related to goal engagement from those related to goal disengagement and goal reengagement and assess these in key domains of life: work, family, and health.

The goal of this project is to explore how culture-specific meanings of happiness give rise to differences both across cultures (Germany and Japanese) and within cultures.

Experiential measures of subjective well-being assess affective reactions over time, either by sampling experiences as they happen or by retrospectively recreating experiences soon after they occur. In this module, respondents reconstruct a full day, describing what they did, who they were with, and how they felt throughout the day.

The SOEP-IS Risk Module consists of two incentive-compatible behavioral risk taking tasks involving described and experienced risk and extends the GSOEP by providing an assessment of individual differences that may predict real-world outcomes such as employment, financial, and health decisions that are partly guided by individuals’ risk tendencies.

Dementia worry may affect a range of important behaviours, such as how people interpret evidence of their own or others’age-related cognitive changes, how they interact with people with dementia, how they anticipate and plan for their future, how they engage in screening and prevention behaviours and how they exploit healthcare resources.

We introduce two questions measuring attitudes towards income redistribution and two questions on the beliefs of the causes of low and high income. Together with existing SOEP questions, these allow estimating the relative importance of self-interest, fairness considerations, and various other factors in explaining attitudes towards redistribution.

Would you like to know the exact day of your death? The goal of this SOEP-IS module is to examine the determinants of people’s knowledge preferences, and more specifically, the reasons behind the puzzling and sometimes strong desire for explicitly not wanting to know (cost-free) information.

Couples who live apart together (LAT), i.e. who do not share a household, do so for a variety of reasons. We measure two major indicators to determine respondents’ LAT type: how easily cohabitation would be feasible and how much respondents would actually desire to live together in the future.

Using a short form of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) we examine associations of the use of two habitual emotion regulation strategies, suppression and reappraisal, with demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, indicators of health, quality of life, and social functioning, and with life events and chronic stressors.

The module is concerned with the determinants of stock market participation and the (perceived) risks people expose themselves to in their investments. At the module’s heart is an elicitation and an experimental manipulation of respondents’ beliefs about the return on the German stock market.

The module investigates attitudes toward the willingness to show solidarity with European Union countries faced with severe economic troubles. It contains of three elements: (1) attitudes toward Germany’s financial support for crisis countries within and outside the European Union, (2) the willingness to pay a hypothetical direct aid contribution in the form of a permanent income tax with three tax rates proposed, (3) attitudes on austerity measures to be implemented by the country receiving financial aid.

Including the Flourishing scale into the SOEP-IS would enable researchers to measure the impact of major life events and other variables of the SOEP not only on satisfaction but improvement or impairment of critical psychological domains associated with psychological and physiological health, well-being and happiness.

Many life events do not happen out of the blue but can be anticipated beforehand. To investigate these kinds of anticipation effects, participants were asked to indicate how likely it was that different events would occur in the next 12 months. Events from various life domains (e.g., family, work, mobility) were included.

The IP-Module includes a short scale of the CIPS to assess the impostor phenomenon. The impostor phenomenon describes an internal experience of intellectual and professional phoniness despite objective evidence indicating the opposite. Sufferers are unable to internalize their successful experiences and tend to neglect the objective evidence of their competence

Inattentional blindness (IB) is the failure to notice salient events while one is paying attention to something else. IB has been widely replicated but has never been measured in a nationally representative sample. We measure IB’s prevalence and its association with ADHD and autism, and with socio-demographic background.

We propose that one important cause of gender inequality is the presence of gender stereotypes in society. We describe two approaches to measure gender stereotypes: an explicit questionnaire based on rating scales and an Implicit Association Test. Findings indicate that gender stereotypes are related to socioeconomic and social variables.

The utilization of new media technologies is a relatively novel phenomenon in mental healthcare, although numerous German citizens are familiar with using the Internet for health information purposes. This module aims to identify the awareness of Internet-based psychotherapy, experience with psychotherapy and online counselling, and use of online health information.

The factorial survey module on job preferences and willingness to accept job offers provides multidimensional, experimental measurements of job preferences and demanded compensations for (un-)favorable working conditions. It enables deeper insights on the impact of gender, household structures, and job conditions on inequalities in the labor market.

Job tasks carried out by individuals can differ significantly even within narrowly defined occupations. This module asks respondents about the job tasks they carry out at their workplace, hence allowing for a detailed look into occupations. Subsequent waves of this module would allow analyzing job changes due to idiosyncratic shocks.

The GeNECA data collected in 2012 covers a broad range of issues: quality of life, capabilities, expectations about the preservation of living conditions for next generations, attitudes towards justice and the environment, actors for sustainable development, regional currency and sustainable consumption with regard to car use and organic food.

Individuals differ systematically in how readily they perceive situations to be unjust and how strongly they react to subjective injustice – cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally. Justice sensitivity from the perspectives of a victim, observer, beneficiary, and perpetrator can be measured reliably with two items per perspective.

This SOEP-IS module measures lottery play (expenditure, frequency, individual vs. social play) plus three possible explanatory variables: A “daydreaming”-scale, measuring individual tendencies to indulge in fantasies about positive future states; an “alienation”-scale, measuring senselessness and dissatisfaction with daily (work) routines, and a “work-ethic”-scale, measuring attitudes toward work and effort.

Our SOEP-IS module is concerned with the investigation of narcissism, its development and interpersonal, intrapersonal, and institutional consequences. Including a theoretically sound, reliable, and efficient measure of narcissism (NARQ-S) enables researchers to investigate a variety of focal research questions with wide-ranging implications on individual, social, and societal levels.

Our SOEP-IS module is concerned with the investigation of narcissism, its development and interpersonal, intrapersonal, and institutional consequences. Including a theoretically sound, reliable, and efficient measure of narcissism (NARQ-S) enables researchers to investigate a variety of focal research questions with wide-ranging implications on individual, social, and societal levels.

The module measures perceived discrimination on different grounds and in various areas of life. The data allow for investigating how discrimination is related to demographic and socioeconomic variables as well as indicators such as health or life satisfaction. Subsequent waves would also enable to test if changes in the respondents’ lives affect self-reports of discrimination.

This module is concerned with the coincidence of personal and economic ties. On the one hand, there are questions on prenuptial agreements (i.e., situations in which economic thoughts infringe on a personal relationship). On the other hand, the module includes items on workplace romance (i.e., situations in which the private sphere finds its way into the workplace).

The respondents’ physical attractiveness is rated by the interviewer on a seven-point scale.

The module aims at deriving measures of labour supply preferences at the individual level from hypothetical questions. Four questions ask respondents what change in earnings would compensate them for a change in their weekly working time. One question measures how their labour supply would change after a shock to their non-earned income.

The globalization of life has turned mobility into an essential feature of everyday life. This implies that individuals must engage with questions regarding their geographical placement, which in turn means that regional identification may be relevant for individuals in the 21st century (cf. Zimmermann et al. , submitted for publication; Schubach, Zimmermann, Noack, & Neyer, in press). It was therefore measured with one single item with the established SOEP item on regional identification.

This module investigates how different forms of presenting factual information influence people’s knowledge about, risk perception of an attitudes towards foxes. The results will be valuable for designing effective knowledge transfer tools, since attitudes and risk perception in the general public are crucial determinants for the success of conservation measures.

We measure overconfidence in various domains of life and over several waves. These measures, in combination with the rich panel structure in the SOEP, allow us to examine the prevalence of overconfidence in different domains and how overconfidence responds to life events. We also investigate how overconfidence affects labor-market outcomes.

We are interested in identifying why and through which processes personality is changing throughout adulthood by analyzing whether individuals actively change their own personality traits. Specifically, we measure (a) the subjective desirability of personality change, (b) the subjective feasibility of personality change, and (c) actual personality change.

In this project we develop a new research design that enables us to measure and disentangle multiple types of error: method, social desirability, acquiescence (tendency to select first category) and random error. Furthermore, we investigate how these errors change in time and how they compare cross-culturally.

To overcome the lack of reliable measures of physical activity, this SOEP-IS module consists of thoroughly developed questions on the kind of physical activity, the frequency and intensity, as well as, the organizational format a sport is practiced and the possible persistence of activity patterns over the span of life.

To overcome the lack of reliable measures of physical activity, this SOEP-IS module consists of thoroughly developed questions on the kind of physical activity, the frequency and intensity, as well as, the organizational format a sport is practiced and the possible persistence of activity patterns over the span of life.