Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Personality and Subjective Well-Being

Using the german socio-economic panel study to assess age-related changes in life satisfaction

Do People Really Adapt to Marriage?

Reexamining Adaptation and the Set Point Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status

According to adaptation theory, individuals react to events but quickly adapt back to baseline levels of subjective well-being. To test this idea, the authors used data from a 15-year longitudinal study of over 24,000 individuals to examine the effects of marital transitions on life satisfaction. On average, individuals reacted to events and then adapted back toward baseline levels. However, there ...

Use of health services according to income before and after elimination of copayment in Germany and restriction of universal health coverage in Spain

In Germany copayment for medical consultation was eliminated in 2013, and in Spain universal health coverage was partly restricted in 2012. This study shows the relationship between income and the use of health services before and after these measures in each country.

Who Has It and Who Gets It?: The Role of Gender, Resources, and Transitions for Power within Couples

Social inequality within intimate relationships is a central dimension of social inequalities in the wider society and is highly related to power imbalances. In couples, partners who have power are able to manipulate the distribution of gains and costs in the relationship. Furthermore, power manifests itself within partners interaction and, thus, is a dynamic process. Therefore, the power allocation ...

When My Money Becomes Our Money: Changes in Couples’ Money Management

Conservative welfare state policies as in Germany often presume that money is a common resource within couples and, therefore, pooled. Research, however, indicates that money is increasingly managed separately or partly separately. This trend is either explained by the diversification of forms of relationships or interpreted as a general decline of the joint pooling of money. Contributing to this debate, ...

Is maternal labor market re-entry after childbirth facilitated by mothers’ and partners’ flextime?

How do national-level work–life balance policies shape the role of flextime in maternal labor market re-entry after childbirth? It is well known that such policies influence the adoption, provision, and support of flexible work arrangements by organizations, but whether they shape the relevance of these arrangements for workers has been neglected in past research. This article analyzes whether mothers’ ...

Gender Discrepancies in the Outcomes of Schedule Control on Overtime Hours and Income in Germany

Schedule control can have both positive—e.g., increased income—and negative outcomes—e.g., increased overtime. Here our core interest is whether there are gender discrepancies in these outcomes. Given the different ways in which schedule control can be used, and perceived to be used by men and women, their outcomes are also expected to be different. This is examined using the German Socio-Economic ...

Can Happiness Apps Generate Nationally Representative Datasets? - a Case Study Collecting Data on People’s Happiness Using the German Socio-Economic Panel

In the last few years, apps have become an important tool to collect data. Especially in the case of data on people’s happiness, two projects have received substantial attention from both the media and the scientific world: “Track your happiness” from Killingsworth and Gilbert (Science, 330, 932-932, 2010), and “Mappiness,” from MacKerron (2012). Both happiness apps used the experience sampling method ...