The Spread of the Coronavirus in Germany: Socio-Economic Factors and Consequences (SOEP-CoV)

Study Information

The SOEP-CoV project studies the factors that influence the short, medium, and long-term socio-economic consequences of the coronavirus in Germany. 

 SOEP-CoV focuses on the following topics:

a) Prevalence, health behavior, and health inequalities
b) Labor market and employment
c) Social life, networks, and mobility
d) Mental health and well-being
e) Social cohesion

For SOEP-CoV, data were collected at two points in time during the COVID pandemic: from the beginning of April to July 2020, and from January to February 2021. In the first phase of the survey, 6,694 individuals were interviewed. Of these, 6,038 agreed to take part in the second survey.

Funding for SOEP-CoV, a joint project of Bielefeld University and SOEP at DIW Berlin, is provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of a call for research into the coronavirus since the outbreak of Sars-CoV-2.

The project team is working closely with colleagues from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Charité Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB), the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG), and the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).

For first SOEP-CoV survey, the participating SOEP households were divided into nine subsamples or tranches. The subsamples were structured in such a way that household composition within each one was representative of the population of private households in Germany. Subsamples 1 to 5 were surveyed every two weeks and subsamples 5 to 9 were surveyed weekly to measure how the crisis was affecting private households over time. A total of 12,000 households were asked to participate in the SOEP-CoV study. The (rounded) number of households in each of the nine samples was: 3000, 3000, 2,000, 1000, 600, 600, 600, 600, 600. This meant that more households were interviewed at the beginning of the survey, when Germany had stricter social distancing restrictions in place, than at the end, when restrictions had been loosened. This design reflects the assumption that the effects of the crisis are likely to have been more severe at the beginning and to have decreased over time.

Documentation

All documents such as methodological reports, questionnaires, and publications on the study can be found under Documentation on the SOEP Studies. By using the filter “type of documentation”, you can narrow your search.