Celebrating SOEP's 25th Wave
The twenty-fifth wave of the household panel SOEP is an outstanding occasion to think back on the beginnings of a longitudinal scientific project that was launched in difficult times at the beginning of the eighties. Many of those who witnessed its inception did not foresee the great scientific relevance that SOEP would achieve and that we ourselves have experienced.
It was theoretical considerations on personal income distribution and insights into the emerging potentials of electronic data processing that made clear to me the need for this kind of household panel data. With the improved possibilities for scientific analysis, I realized that a micro-longitudinal database of private households and families would be indispensable for addressing many important questions of our social development.
Actually translating such an innovative-but also expensive-project into reality requires, first and foremost, the engagement of individuals who will fight for their cause, withstand setbacks, and proceed unwaveringly. That, perhaps, was my forté. But it was also thanks to the tenacity of a young researcher, Ute Hanefeld, who made the SOEP project her very own and fought for it with continual vigor on many fronts.
And yet the SOEP project's success cannot be attributed solely to the efforts of individuals. SOEP is a compelling example of the vast potential for teamwork in scientific social and economic research. For this reason, SOEP's development was not disrupted by the changes in leadership when I moved to Hamburg to take office as Senator for Financial Affairs and Sociologist Wolfgang Zapf took over for about one year in 1988/89, or when Gert G. Wagner finally took over from him. Rather, quite the opposite was the case: Gert Wagner brought the SOEP project important new innovations and increased momentum. And when the iron curtain fell, the SOEP team in Berlin supported by the survey institute TNS Infratest in Munich was ready to launch their first additional sample in the former GDR.
The SOEP team today is proof that this spirit has been kept alive. I am thinking here particularly of Jürgen Schupp, who has been part of SOEP's staff since 1984, and Joachim R. Frick, who joined SOEP in 1989. Despite the additional burden of their service responsibilities and duties as deputy directors of the SOEP Department at DIW Berlin, they have built outstanding academic careers for themselves as renowned and respected researchers. Other members of the SOEP team have been awarded tenured professorships at universities and colleges. And today's multidisciplinary network of survey oriented scientists and researchers in and around the SOEP team extends far beyond the project's institutional and geographic bounds in downtown Berlin.
The original core group that founded SOEP was a research group (named SPES, the Latin word for hope) that later became a Collaborative Research Center of the German Research Foundation (Sonderforschungsbereich 3). It involved researchers from different disciplines and departments of the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Mannheim, and later also Berlin. SOEP's recipe for success has not been to promote intense competition among individuals, but rather to foster cooperation. The group acquired its institutional connection to DIW Berlin through my presidency there from 1978 to 1988. The DIW ensured the SOEP project the kind of continuity no university could provide in that period. At the same time, it was only through cooperation with universities that SOEP was able to overcome the inherent (disciplinary) limitations of an economic research institute that existed even then.
Our objective was also to make use of synergies for SOEP. If public funds were to be used to collect such valuable data, we wanted to ensure that the data would be made widely available. In line with this goal, we established the policy of immediate data distribution, which has no doubt contributed significantly to SOEP's success. To this day, there still exist scholars who want to keep the data they have collected to themselves. The German Socio-Economic Panel is convincing evidence that good scholars don't need to.
Twenty-five years of SOEP: An international user's perspective
A famous physicist, began his acclaimed history of the universe with the sentence, “After the first thirty seconds all the interesting physics were over”. Just the opposite is true of SOEP and other great national socio-economic household panels. They get better with age. They exist to enable social scientists to describe and explain social and economic change, and draw out the public policy implications of change. Many public policies – for example, educational and other human capital investment policies, and policies related to retirement and pension schemes – are intended to bring about beneficial long term change. So it is essential to have panel studies which track and document long term change, including the impact of policies on change.
One of the keys to SOEP’s success has been its policy of making the data available almost free of charge to all academic users, including international users, who sign a straightforward confidentiality agreement. This policy is one of enlightened self-interest. Together with the high quality of the data, the policy has ensured that thousands of academics, world-wide, are aware of SOEP and hundreds use it for their own research; often in order to make international comparisons of social and economic change, or of public policy developments.
I may be SOEP’s most long distance user. I am also an old-time user, having first analysed the data in 1987 in Mannheim. In 1987 SOEP was in fact directed in Frankfurt and Mannheim, DIW Berlin was the junior partner, and I remember sitting in an old University of Mannheim house on the Rhine, trying to get an old Siemens computer to analyse these new exotic panel data.
Panel data were very new to European social scientists in the 1980s, so it was comparatively easy for us come up with new and apparently astonishing findings, which contradicted the received wisdom of the time. For example, in the late 1980s there was a concern that Germany was becoming ‘a two-thirds society’; a society in which two-thirds of the population had a comfortable lifestyle, while one-third were locked into poverty or near-poverty. There was some evidence to support that viewpoint, if one used only standard cross-sectional data. But panel studies were already beginning to show that many phenomena which had previously been thought of as characteristically long term, including poverty and welfare reliance, were more often short term. So we were able to show, with very straightforward analysis, that most income poverty in Germany was short term, and that nothing like one-third of society was locked into long term poverty. This is still, although for long term unemployment raised, the case.
Such simple descriptive research remains important, especially in the policy arena. But nowadays SOEP users are able to undertake much more elaborate, probing analyses which help to explain, as well as describe, social and economic changes. These analyses have become possible for three reasons (1) the availability of long term data (2) development of improved methods of panel data analysis and (3) historical developments which have created special research opportunities.
The very major historical development, which incidentally created opportunities for SOEP users, was of course German reunification. Labour economists, using SOEP, and observing what happened to East German employees whose human capital had become partly outmoded but could be refurbished, were able to gain new insights into the relative value and durability of different qualifications and labour market skills. In a similar vein, sociologists and economists studying child development, were able to use comparisons between the very different child care systems of East and West Germany to make improved evaluations of the impact of child care on children’s later educational performance.
When SOEP began, the data were mainly of interest to economists and sociologists. Indeed, the survey was under the direction of economists and sociologists. In the last decade or so, SOEP’s range of advisers has expanded. So the survey’s coverage has expanded to take in the interests of academics from other disciplines. Psychologists make use of measures of psychological traits and subjective evaluations, demographers and students of child development use new biographical data on the life course and data from the new ‘mother and child’ questionnaires, and health researchers can use new physiological measures and measures of physical and mental functioning.
In my view, one reason SOEP has been so successful is that, throughout its history, it has remained under academic direction. In many countries panel surveys have been started under Governmental direction. These surveys have generally died an early death. They fall victim to a Government cost-cutting exercise, or get cancelled because they bring unwelcome policy news. The key advantage of a panel study under academic direction, is, or ought to be, a commitment to innovation and a capacity to react rapidly to opportunities. The bold decision to get SOEP into East Germany during the first phase of transition, conducting interviews before reunification, when the former GDR occupational and educational systems were still in place, was a superb example of a desire to innovate and a capacity to react.
History will continue to throw up opportunities. May SOEP long be around to react!
Bruce Headey, University of Melbourne/Australia
(joined the SOEP-Survey Team for nine months – October 2007 until July 2008)
Address
The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is a cornerstone in the research infrastructure of socioeconomic and behavioral studies in Germany, Europe, and even the world. The data gathered from approximately 25,000 representative children and adults is the basis for the work of hundreds of German as well as international researchers. Thus the SOEP is an excellent example of the significant role of the Leibniz Association in the German research infrastructure.
The surveys of the SOEP are of great use for research and politics as well as for the general public. The high standard on which the SOEP staff, as all other institutions affiliated with the Leibniz Association, operates is ensured through regular external evaluations.
The SOEP is a panel study which is part of the research infrastructure-a challenge that can only be met when research and service are combined, since only those who practice research themselves will know what data other researchers need. The principal investigators of a panel study have to be able to anticipate upcoming research topics for the next few years, even decades, and shape the survey accordingly.
In general the Leibniz Association is committed to the balance between basic research and applied research. In addition, its goal is providing research infrastructure, academic service, and research-based policy advice. This bundle of aims is one of the main challenges for the SOEP, since the maintenance of such an extensive survey is very labor-intensive. Thus we were very pleased to see that the SOEP was one of three institutions that were rated "excellent" by the German Council of Science and Humanities ("Wissenschaftsrat") in its first research rating in the field of Sociology that took place in 2008. In addition, the SOEP was the only institution to be praised for its formidable combination of research, knowledge transfer, and policy advice. So as I have mentioned before, the SOEP is a prime example of an institution that embodies the ideals of the Leibniz Association.