100 participants at 15th SOEP User Conference
News of July 8, 2024
Immediately following its 40th anniversary ceremony at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, SOEP held a two-day user conference entitled “The individual and collective responses to a changing world.”
With 15 sessions and 64 presentations, the conference impressively demonstrated the wide range of topics covered by research on SOEP data. One of the keynote speakers at the conference, economist Simon Jäger from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston, described the SOEP as a “dataset we all know, adore, and love.” SOEP’s multidisciplinary perspective was widely recognized by the conference participants – and impressively demonstrated. Every two years, researchers from economics, sociology, political science, psychology and other disciplines present their current research based on SOEP data.
A particular highlight of the conference was the presentation of panel studies from other countries that, like the SOEP, participate in the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF). The project harmonizes extensive data from 16 panel studies worldwide and makes it available to researchers. Representatives of partner studies from Australia, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA provided exciting insights into the data sets of their home countries. Finally, C. Katharina Spieß, Director of the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), awarded this year’s Felix Büchel Prize to Denis Gerstorf (Professor of Developmental Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). Gerstorf has spent a large part of his successful career researching with SOEP data.
