Publikationen des Vorstandsbereichs

A Nod to Public Open Access Infrastructures

The Role of Morbidity for Proxy-Reported Well-Being in the Last Year of Life

Late-life well-being often shows steep deteriorations, but the contributing factors are not well understood, in part because data about people’s final year of life are scarce. Here, we draw from and test theoretical perspectives that health-related vulnerabilities undermine the experience and skills older adults typically use to maintain well-being (Charles, 2010). To do so, we examined how various ...

Can Facts Trump Unconditional Trust? Evidence-Based Information Halves the Influence of Physicians' Non-Evidence-Based Cancer Screening Recommendations

Informed decision making in medicine, defined as basing one’s decision on the best current medical evidence, requires both informed physicians and informed patients. In cancer screening, however, studies document that these prerequisites are not yet met. Many physicians do not know or understand the medical evidence behind screening tests, do not adequately counsel (asymptomatic) people on screening, ...

Food Intake and the Role of Food Self-Provisioning

This article investigates the role of food self-provisioning for the intake of nutrients of households in Mongolia. We analyse nutritional outcomes within and across urban wage employees, rural households with small herds, and pastoralists with large herds. Food self-provisioning significantly affects dietary quality and quantity. Farming food crops improves the nutrient intake. In contrast, animal ...

"What Else Are You Worried about?" - Integrating Textual Responses into Quantitative Social Science Research

Open-ended questions have routinely been included in large-scale survey and panel studies, yet there is some perplexity about how to actually incorporate the answers to such questions into quantitative social science research. Tools developed recently in the domain of natural language processing offer a wide range of options for the automated analysis of such textual data, but their implementation ...

Estimation of Structural Vector Autoregressive Models

In this survey, estimation methods for structural vector autoregressive models are presented in a systematic way. Both frequentist and Bayesian methods are considered. Depending on the model setup and type of restrictions, least squares estimation, instrumental variables estimation, method-of-moments estimation and generalized method-of-moments are considered. The methods are presented in a unified ...

Changes in Life Satisfaction when Losing One's Spouse: Individual Differences in Anticipation, Reaction, Adaptation and Longevity in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Losing a spouse is among the most devastating events that may occur in people's lives. We use longitudinal data from 1,224 participants in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine (a) how life satisfaction changes with the experience of spousal loss; (b) whether socio-demographic factors and social and health resources moderate spousal loss-related changes in life satisfaction; and (c) ...

The Linked Employer–Employee Study of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-LEE): Content, Design and Research Potential

Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Multi-Indicator Constellations of Physical Health and Psychosocial Correlates

Well-being is often relatively stable across adulthood and old age, but typically exhibits pronounced deteriorations and vast individual differences in the terminal phase of life. However, the factors contributing to these differences are not well understood. Using up to 25-year annual longitudinal data obtained from 4,404 now-deceased participants of the nationwide German Socio-Economic Panel Study ...

Long-Term Effects of an Extensive Cognitive Training on Personality Development

Objective: Previous research found that cognitive training increases the Big Five personality trait openness to experience during and some weeks after the intervention. The present study investigated whether long-term changes happen in openness to experience and other personality traits after an extensive cognitive training of memory and perceptual speed.Method: Intervention group consisted of 204 ...