Title: Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), data from 1984-2015
DOI: 10.5684/soep.v32
Collection period: 1984-2015
Publication date: December 14, 2016
Principal investigators: Jürgen Schupp, Jan Goebel, Martin Kroh, Carsten Schröder, Charlotte Bartels, Klaudia Erhardt, Alexandra Fedorets, Marco Giesselmann, Markus Grabka, Peter Krause, Simon Kühne, David Richter, Diana Schacht, Paul Schmelzer, Christian Schmitt, Daniel Schnitzlein, Rainer Siegers, Knut Wenzig
The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study 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 15,000 households, and more than 25,000 persons sampled by the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung. The data provide information on all household members, consisting of Germans living in the Eastern and Western German States, foreigners, and 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. As early as June 1990—even before the Economic, Social and Monetary Union—SOEP expanded to include the states of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), thus seizing the rare opportunity to observe the transformation of an entire society. Also immigrant samples were added in 1994/95 and 2013/2015 to account for the changes that took place in Germany society. Further new samples were added in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. Since Version 31 (10.5684/soep.v31) the SOEP includes the complete data from “Familien in Deutschland” (Families in Germany, FiD) which has been retrospectively integrated into the SOEP and made available in user-friendly form to all SOEP users. The FiD survey has been carried out in parallel to the SOEP as a so-called “SOEP-related study” from 2010 to 2013. The survey is constantly being adapted and developed in response to current social developments. The international version contains 95% of all cases surveyed (see 10.5684/soep.v32i).
Data collector: TNS Infratest Sozialforschung GmbH.
Population: Persons living in private households in Germany.
Selection method: All samples of SOEP are multi-stage random samples which are regionally clustered. The respondents (households) are selected by random-walk.
Collection mode: The interview methodology of the SOEP is based on a set of pre-tested questionnaires for households and individuals. Principally an interviewer tries to obtain face-to-face interviews with all members of a given survey household aged 16 years and over. Additionally one person (head of household) is asked to answer a household related questionnaire covering information on housing, housing costs, and different sources of income. This covers also some questions on children in the household up to 16 years of age, mainly concerning attendance at institutions (kindergarten, elementary school, etc.)
Data set information:
| Number of units | 113,840 |
| Number of variables | 61,902 in 413 data sets |
| Data format | STATA, SPSS, SAS, CSV |
MD5 fingerprints
Publications:
The SOEP micro data which we make available for scientific research can only be interpreted using statistical software. Direct use of SOEP data is subject to the high standards for lawful data protection in the Federal Republic of Germany. Signing a contract on data distribution with the DIW Berlin is therefore a precondition for working with SOEP data. After signing the contract, the data of every new wave will be available on request.
more information
Version specific changes in the dataset.
Documentation of
Sample Sizes and Panel Attrition 1984-2015
$HGEN (Household-related Status and Generated Variables)
$PGEN (Person-related Status and Generated Variables)
$KIND (Person-related Variables on Children)
HPFAD (Household-related Meta-dataset)
PPFAD (Person-related Meta-dataset)
HEALTH
KIDLONG (Pooled Dataset on Children)
$HBRUTTO
$PBRUTTO
$PEQUIV
Biography and Life History Data (ARTKALEN, BIOAGE17, BIOAGEL, BIOBIRTH, BIOCOUPLM, BIOCOUPLY, BIOIMMIG, BIOJOB, BIOMARSM, BIOMARSY, BIOPAREN, BIORESID BIOEDU, BIOSIB, BIOSOC, BIOTWIN, LIFESPELL, MIGSPELL, PBIOSPE, PPFAD)