SOEP Research: Dynamics of Well-Being and Health

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 ...

Stress and Resilience in the Labor Market

Personality in the Classroom: Interactions of Parental SES and Students’ Big Five in Predicting School Performance

While socioeconomic status (SES) and personality have both been identified as relevant predictors of academic achievement, little is known about their possible interplay in predicting school performance. The present study used the latent moderated structural equations (LMS) method to investigate latent interactions between familial SES and parent-rated Big Five in a sample of German high school students ...

The biological trace of public health policies: how Medicaid improved epigenetic aging in adolescence

Public health insurance for U.S. children has expanded dramatically through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), yet the biological mechanisms linking these policies to long-run health remain poorly understood. We test whether childhood eligibility for Medicaid/CHIP causally affects epigenetic aging measures. Using longitudinal epigenetic data from the Fragile Families and...

The Unequal Distribution of Bitterness: Tracing Ressentiment in Times of Change

Modern democracies are undergoing multiple, overlapping transformations, driven by globalization, digitalization, migration, inequality, and climate change. While some adapt with openness, others experience what Mau et al. (2023) term Veränderungserschöpfung – change fatigue: the sense that “too much is changing, too fast, and all at once.” This paper examines whether and how such fatigue...

The Rise in Absenteeism in 2022 Is Only Partly Due to Electronic Sick Notes

In Germany, employee absences due to illness rose sharply, particularly in 2022. Various sources argue that the introduction of the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU) caused this. Official data previously did not include absences that were not reported to health insurance providers; since the introduction of the eAU, this is no longer the case. This gap does not exist in Socio-Economic ...

Within-Nation Variation in War Exposure and Psychological and Physical Adjustment

Extensive evidence suggests that war-related trauma negatively affects health, yet its long-term and transgenerational effects on psychological and physical adjustment remain poorly understood. This study examines whether individuals who experienced greater war exposure in early childhood—specifically variation in bombardment intensity across German municipalities during the Second World War—show lower, ...

Social Media: Population Favors Regulation—but Ban Only for Those up to the Age of 12

Social media usage by children and young people is an increasingly controversial topic. The focus is on risks, opportunities, and possible regulations. Politicians from all relevant parties are now open to a social media ban up to a certain age; the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs has set up a commission of experts. Based on a short survey in the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), conducted in September ...

Majority of the population sees both risks and opportunities in social media

Beyond Overall Income Inequality: Racial Income Gaps and Health Disparities

In this paper, we combine Census data with death records to examine the relationship between income inequality and race-specific mortality across 5,565 municipalities in Brazil. We find that overall income inequality is strongly associated with Non-White mortality but not with White mortality. To understand this disparity, we decompose the Gini coefficient and find that the racial income gap accounts ...