Forschung SOEP: Dynamiken von Wohlbefinden und Gesundheit

Dynamic Networks of Social Contact, Social Desire, and Affect Across Time Scales

Social relationships are central to well-being because they fulfill social affiliation needs. To explain how social needs are regulated, theories describe daily-life processes among social desire, social contact, and affect. Still, these processes remain empirically underexplored because of their complexity. In this study, we estimated multivariate associations of social desire and affect with social ...

How a Mismatch Between Actual and Desired Fertility Relates to Well-Being Across Adulthood

Introduction Most people want two or more children, but many do not realize their fertility desires. At the same time, recent studies suggest that up to 15% of parents regret having children. To investigate how fertility mismatch relates to well-being (i.e., affect balance, life satisfaction, family life satisfaction, and work satisfaction), this preregistered study used nationally representative cross-sectional ...

The Value of Care: Brokering Work Conditions and Wages within a Transnational Care System

This article explains how the triadic brokering system in the European Union affects the conditions of work and pay of mobile care workers. Using original survey data gathered from Polish care workers in Germany, the authors found that workers earn less money the more hours they work. Based on qualitative interviews with care workers and representatives of labor market intermediaries, they argue that ...

Stress and Resilience in the Labor Market

Stress und Resilienz auf dem Arbeitsmarkt

Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs and the Size of Their Firms

In this study, we examine the relationship between personality traits, captured by risk tolerance and the Big Five traits, and firm size, as measured by the number of employees. We show that the personality of entrepreneurs matters for the size of their firm they operate. We use a novel add-on to the German Socio-Economic Panel that includes a sub-sample of owner-managers running larger firms. High ...

A Co-Creation Approach to Selecting and Adapting Adolescent Tobacco and Air-Pollution Interventions and Strategies for Implementation in Diverse Countries: Insights from FRESHAIR4life

Background : Evidence-based interventions to reduce adolescents’ exposure to tobacco and air pollution are rarely implemented in low- and middle-income countries, often because they lack contextual fit. The ‘FRESHAIR4Life’ project aimed to optimise implementation of contextually adapted, evidence-based interventions in Greece, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Romania, and Uganda. Selecting appropriate interventions ...

Navigating Uncertainty: Do Communicable Diseases Influence Risk Preferences?

This paper explores the effect of COVID-19 infection rates on individuals’ risk preferences using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a large population-wide ran¬dom sample. Exploiting county-level variation in a difference-in-differences design, we find that risk preferences remain unchanged: the effect is precisely estimated at 2.1% of a standard deviation (95% CI: [−0.4%, +4.6%]), ruling out economically ...

The Intergenerational Association between Migration and Early Childhood Development in Germany: A Comparative Cross-Sectional Study of Forced and Voluntary Migrant Families (2004–2021)

Background: Family migration shapes early childhood development (ECD), but the link between parental voluntary versus forced migration experiences and ECD remains underexplored. Germany, with its diverse migration streams, offers an opportunity to investigate this interrelation. Objective: This study examines the link between parental migration status and ECD of children aged 2–4 and investigates ...

Industrial Relations and Working From Home in Germany During the COVID-19 Pandemic

We investigate the role of industrial relations for working from home during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 2020 to 2023 and a special COVID sample (SOEP-CoV) for 2020 and 2021, we examine how collective bargaining and plant-level co-determination are associated with the incidence and frequency of working from home. Controlling ...