The 2026 call for submissions is now open. Interested researchers should contact SOEP-IS Survey Management in alignment with application requirements (see below for details).
The Research Data Center website contains information on the existing SOEP-IS data sets. To find out which surveys have already been conducted, we recommend the SOEP-IS Companion website.
The SOEP Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS) is designed to enable innovative data collection for the research community. It is particularly well suited to establishing new and target-group-specific measurement instruments in long-term surveys, to conducting short- and long-term experiments, and to collecting non-survey data (such as biomarkers).
The SOEP team would like to highlight the potential of the SOEP Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS) for SOEP data users and encourage you to take advantage of this tool to have household-level microdata collected for your research questions. If your research requires information at the household level, for example, or specific information on people’s opinions, SOEP-IS gives you the opportunity to collect this information.
Past SOEP-IS modules include (complex) economic behavioral experiments, implicit association tests (IAT), and complex procedures for measuring time use with (day reconstruction method, DRM).
Data from SOEP-IS modules are provided exclusively to the researchers who submitted the respective proposals for an initial 12-month period. After this embargo has ended, the data are released to the entire SOEP user community for secondary analysis.
An overview of the innovative modules implemented thus far can be found in our SOEP-IS Companion (http://www.diw.de/soep-is-mod).
Proposals may be submitted by email to SOEP-IS survey management at: soep-is@diw.de.
A subcommittee of the SOEP Survey Committee will evaluate and rate the relevance and significance of the proposed questions. If the proposed project already has funding from the DFG or other third-party funding agencies, this step of external evaluation will be skipped. Since projects funded by the DFG and other organizations also need to be feasible from a survey methodology perspective, researchers who are interested in submitting a proposal should contact SOEP-IS Survey Management before applying to the DFG or other prominent funding agencies.
All proposals are evaluated for scientific quality, suitability, feasibility, and costs. The following aspects are taken into consideration:
Scientific quality and relevance
Suitability for the SOEP Innovation Sample
Feasibility
SOEP-IS is an infrastructure for the international research community. Survey questions from accepted proposals will be incorporated into SOEP-IS at no additional cost.
If it is necessary to incorporate additional subsamples into SOEP-IS, the researchers submitting the proposal will be expected to raise outside funding.
Similarly, if a proposal includes behavioral experiments or content that has not been evaluated (for example, biomarkers), or new modes of data collection, the researchers submitting the proposal will be expected to raise outside funding.
If a funding application has been approved by an external peer-reviewed funding agency (for example, DFG or the NIH in the United States), the approval is considered proof of the study’s scientific merit, and the module will be included in SOEP-IS without further evaluation.
Researchers interested in submitting a proposal should contact SOEP-IS Survey Management by March 31, 2025, and provide a brief description of their project. If a project is determined to be feasible from a survey methodology perspective, the official submission procedure will follow. The proposal must be submitted by April 30, 2025. Data will usually be collected between March and June of the following year. We look forward to hearing your ideas.
Applications, questions, and comments should be submitted in English to soep-is@diw.de.