Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

The Social Consequences of Housing

Selectivity and Flexibility in the German Secondary School System: A Configurational Analysis of Recent Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel

Debate continues in many European countries about both equality of opportunity and the continuing wastage of talent, and the ways in which differing systems of secondary schooling contribute to these. Drawing on Turner’s concepts of sponsored and contest mobility and on Allmendinger’s classification along the dimensions of stratification and selection, we describe the amount of flexibility currently ...

Qualitative Work and the Testing and Development of Theory: Lessons from a Study Combining Cross-Case and Within-Case Analysis via Ragin's QCA

Charles RAGIN's work, especially his development of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), offers social scientists a way of bringing together the strengths of the qualitative and quantitative traditions. QCA takes a case-based rather than a variable-based analytic approach to cross-case analysis. One problem that arises in attempting to use QCA to explore causation in larger datasets, especially ...

Trends in the prevalence of grandparent households in selected European countries and the United States

Our aim is to investigate trends in the prevalence of grandparent households over time (that is households including a grandparent-grandchild dyad) in selected European countries and the United States. We also identify the socio-economic and demographic characteristics associated with variations in such households. Given changes in family behaviour (for example, rises in divorce and step-families) ...

Wolfgang Zapf—Pioneer of Social Indicators- and Quality of Life-Research

The Spread of Social Indicators- and Quality of Life-Research in Germany and Europe: An Overview in Honour of Alex Michalos (Chapter 12)

This overview is a comprehensive reconstruction of the social indicators movement from the middle of the 1960s up to the actual quality of life and wellbeing-research 50 years later. The time span regarded here corresponds roughly with the professional life of the two authors and the article is dedicated to Alex Michalos, to whom our research network thanks a lot.

The Effect of Student Aid on the Duration of Study

In this paper I evaluate the effect of student aid on the success of academic studies. I focus on two dimensions, the duration of study and the probability of actually graduating with a degree. While there is an extensive literature on the impact of student aid on its intended outcome, the uptake of tertiary education, the impact on the outcome and on study incentives has been mainly ignored. But introducing ...

Refugees in Germany with Children Still Living Abroad Have Lowest Life Satisfaction

Family strongly influences personal well-being—especially in the case of refugees, whose family members often remain in their homeland. This report is the first to closely examine the well-being and family structures of refugees who came to Germany between January 2013 and January 2016. It uses data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany. Among individuals aged between 18 and 49, nine ...

Study Shows High Enrollment in Daycare and School among Refugee Children, but the Possible Need for More Daycare for Children under Three and More Language Support for School-Aged Children

For refugee children, daycare or elementary school can play an important role in integration into German society. In the context of the arrival of more than 890,000 refugees in Germany in 2015 alone, this study focuses on daycare and school attendance among refugee children up to the age of 12. It is based on data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, a representative study of more than 4,500 ...

The Effect of Early Childhood Education and Care Services on the Social Integration of Refugee Families

Devising appropriate policy measures for the integration of refugees is high on the agenda of many governments. This paper focuses on the social integration of families seeking asylum in Germany between 2013 and 2016. Exploiting differences in services availability across counties as an exogenous source of variation, we evaluate the effect of early education attendance by refugee children on their ...