The SOEP was founded in 1983 under the leadership of Prof. Hans-Jürgen Krupp as a subproject of the “Microanalytical Foundations of Social Policy” Collaborative Research Center, which was based at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main and Mannheim and funded by the German Research Association (DFG) since 1979.
In 1983, Krupp brought the SOEP to DIW Berlin. There, he succeeded in establishing the SOEP as an innovative household panel study that was used by researchers beyond the confines of the Collaborative Research Center. After taking office as Hamburg State Minister for Economic Affairs in 1988, Prof. Wolfgang Zapf, then President of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, took over for one year as director of the SOEP. In 1989, Prof. Gert G. Wagner, who was teaching at the Technical University Berlin, took his place. Together with an outstanding staff, Wagner made the SOEP one of the most important social science research infrastructures worldwide. It was thanks to Wagner’s efforts that the SOEP succeeded in incorporating a sample of respondents from East Germany immediately after the fall of the Wall and a sample of ethnic German repatriates and migrants from the former Eastern bloc in the mid-1990s.
In early 2011, Gert G. Wagner was appointed to the DIW Berlin Executive Board and served for two years as Board Chairman. Joachim Frick and Jürgen Schupp took over as Deputy Directors of the SOEP. After Joachim Frick’s death in December 2011, Jürgen Schupp became Director of the SOEP and was appointed Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin in 2013. Schupp and his team successfully established the SOEP Innovation Panel, expanded the scope of the SOEP study to address psychological research questions, and worked to develop the SOEP’s network with international research data infrastructures.
In early 2018, Stefan Liebig, Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin (previously University of Bielefeld), took Jürgen Schupp’s place as Director of the SOEP infrastructure and Gert G. Wagner’s position on the DIW Berlin Executive Board. Liebig left the DIW in 2022 after accepting a professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since then, Prof. Dr. Sabine Zinn has been Acting Director of the SOEP.
After the funding of sub-project B-5, “The Socio-Economic Panel,” within the framework of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center 3, came to an end in 1989, the SOEP was jointly funded by the BMBF and the federal states from 1990 to 2002 within the framework of the Bund-Länder Commission (BLK). The latter provided corresponding funds for the SOEP within the framework of DFG individual project funding. Since 2000, SOEP funding has been further increased with additional funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Since 2003, the SOEP has been institutionally funded as a service institution that “performs scientific infrastructure tasks to a considerable extent” under the umbrella of the Leibniz Association with funds from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the federal states.
SOEP has been reviewed three times by the German Council of Science and Humanities. In 1994, the recommendations of the German Council of Science and Humanities led to the institutional funding of the SOEP as a research-based infrastructure facility and independent unit within DIW Berlin under the umbrella of the Leibniz Association. In 2009, the German Council of Science and Humanities recognized the Socio-Economic Panel as one of the world’s most important research infrastructures in the social, economic, and behavioral sciences and endorsed the SOEP’s expansion plans, which were considered innovative, as well as the establishment of an SOEP Innovation Study in the interests of both basic research and better policy advice. In 2008, the German Council of Science and Humanities compiled a “research rating” in sociology and evaluated the research performance of 254 sociology units in universities and non-university institutions. The SOEP made it into the top group of the strongest sociology research institutions in Germany, and the Science Council rated the research quality of the SOEP at DIW Berlin as “excellent.”
DIW Berlin was successfully evaluated by the Leibniz Association in 2012 and 2019. The “research-driven infrastructure” SOEP was rated “excellent” both times.
In 2024, the SOEP team mourned the loss of two important figures who had a lasting impact on the study: Both founder Hans-Jürgen Krupp and long-time SOEP Director Gert G. Wagner passed away this year.