SOEP Research: Subjective Well-Being, Personality, Health

Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Public Health and Social Measures in Camps and Camp-Like Settings: A Systematic Review and Conceptual Analysis

Objectives: This study examines unintended consequences (UIC) of public health and social measures (PHSM) in camps and camp-like settings and assesses the pathways through which these UIC arise. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and conceptual analysis of UIC from PHSM aimed at preventing SARS-CoV-2 spread in these settings. PHSM were classified using the WHO taxonomy and the CONSEQUENT framework ...

Heterogeneity in Gender Differences in Self-Reported Political Preferences, Trust, and Well-Being across 39 European Countries

Previous research suggests that women tend to self-report higher life satisfaction and happiness, lower health status and trust, and more left-leaning political preferences than men. We revisit the gender gap in these outcome variables using random-effects meta-analysis, aggregating data across 39 countries surveyed in the European Social Survey (n ≈ 500,000). Measured in Cohen’s d units, women, on ...

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 ...

Mapping Life Satisfaction Over the First Years of Cohabitation Among Former Singles Living Alone in UK and Germany

Objective: As social norms and relationship dynamics evolve, it is important to examine how transitions from singlehood to partnership, cohabitation, and marriage relate to well-being Method: Using data from two large panel studies in the UK and Germany (1984–2019), we identified N = 27,459 individuals who reported being single and living alone at least once. Analyses focused on a subset (N = 1103; ...

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 ...

Stress and Resilience in the Labor Market

Collecting Longitudinal Data among Newly Arriving Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Germany: Experiences from A Pilot Study at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Observability, Honesty, and the Social Image Costs of Lying

We study the role of social image in influencing lying behavior through a pre-registered within-subject experiment embedded in the 2020 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). By exogenously manipulating the observability of lying across two tasks, we explore how individuals respond to increased image costs of lying. By exploiting the rich comprehensive socio-demographic ...

How Do Individuals Interact with the Police? Validation of a Scale of Motivational Postures toward the Police in Spanish

This article addressed the critical issue of citizens’ attitudes toward law enforcement, focusing on motivational postures toward the police (i.e., the psychological dispositions that individuals maintain toward the police). The study contributes by providing the first validated motivational postures scale toward the police in Spanish. It responds to a gap in research on motivational postures within ...

Parental Health Shocks and Young Adults’ Life Trajectories (joint work with Anna Person)

As Western populations age, more adult children face parental health challenges. Caregiving responsibilities towards parents are becoming crucial concerns for families, healthcare systems, and societies. While this care is essential for elderly well-being, it also demands significant time, energy and emotional resources. Yet, the impact of care provision on caregivers’ lives remains understudied....