Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Marginal Employment: No Jobs Miracle - Towards a permanent decline of secondary employment?

Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Surveys

This paper concentrates on the trends in peer-reviewed longitudinal panel studies under scientific direction. Household panel studies have succeeded in broadening their disciplinary scope. Numerous innovations such as questions dealing with psychological concepts, and age-specific topical modules, physical health measures, measures of cognitive capabilities, and behavioral experiments have been incorporated ...

Multidisciplinary Household Panel Studies under Academic Direction

This paper concentrates on the trends in peer-reviewed longitudinal panel studies under scientific direction. Household panel studies have succeeded in broadening their disciplinary scope. Numerous innovations such as questions dealing with psychological concepts, and age-specific topical modules, physical health measures, measures of cognitive capabilities, behavioral experiments have been incorporated ...

Editorial – SOEP 2012: The 10th International Socio-Economic Panel User Conference

Professional Qualifications and LongHours the Key to High Income

The Selection of Pay Referents: Potential Patterns and Impacts on Life Satisfaction

Despite the relatively extensive research on pay levels and the consequences of income disparities, little is known about which reference groups people choose for comparative evaluation of personal income and why different selection patterns emerge. The aim of this paper is to dig deeper for answers to the following three questions: (1) What are the most important reference groups for income comparisons? ...

Measuring the Selection of Pay Referents - A Methodological Analysis of the Questions on Pay Referents in the 2008 and 2009 Pretest Modules

Income comparisons are among the key mechanisms used to explain satisfaction and happiness, among other outcomes. Yet progress on the questions of who people use as social referents and whether differential selection patterns exist can only be made based on valid and reliable measures of pay referents included in large-scale population surveys. The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is pursuing ...

The Social Comparison Scale: Testing the Validity, Reliability, and Applicability of the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure (INCOM) on the German Population

Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people’s opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological dispositions. To test the empirical validity of this proposition, Gibbons and Buunk (1999) created an instrument ...

Individual Differences in Social Comparison and its Consequences for Life Satisfaction: Introducing a Short Scale of the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure

Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency to compare one’s own opinions and abilities with those of other people, raising the question of whether social comparisons are psychological dispositions. To test the empirical validity of this proposition, Gibbons and Buunk (1999) created an instrument, the Iowa–Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure (INCOM), that measures ...

Social Comparison Orientations and their Consequences for Justice Perceptions of Earnings

Recently, research on social comparison orientations (SCOs) has shown remarkable inter-individual variation in people’s tendency to compare themselves with others. Whether this variation bears any consequences for social justice research that assumes social comparisons to be a valuable asset in forming images of just earnings is still an unsolved question. This paper takes up this research challenge ...