The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study is a wide-ranging representative longitudinal study of private households, located at the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW Berlin. Every year, there were nearly 15,000 households, and more than 25,000 persons sampled by the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung. The data provide information on all household members, consisting of Germans living in the Eastern and Western German States, foreigners, and immigrants to Germany. The Panel was started in 1984. Some of the many topics include household composition, occupational biographies, employment, earnings, health and satisfaction indicators. As early as June 1990—even before the Economic, Social and Monetary Union—SOEP expanded to include the states of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), thus seizing the rare opportunity to observe the transformation of an entire society. Also immigrant samples were added in 1994/95 and 2013/2015 to account for the changes that took place in Germany society. Further new samples were added in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. Since Version 31 (10.5684/soep.v31) the SOEP includes the complete data from “Familien in Deutschland” (Families in Germany, FiD) which has been retrospectively integrated into the SOEP and made available in user-friendly form to all SOEP users. The FiD survey has been carried out in parallel to the SOEP as a so-called “SOEP-related study” from 2010 to 2013. The survey is constantly being adapted and developed in response to current social developments. The international version contains 95% of all cases surveyed (see 10.5684/soep.v32i).
Title: Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), data from 1984-2015
DOI: 10.5684/soep.v32.1
Collection period: 1984-2015
Publication date: February 14, 2017
Principal investigators: Jürgen Schupp, Jan Goebel, Martin Kroh, Carsten Schröder, Charlotte Bartels, Klaudia Erhardt, Alexandra Fedorets, Marco Giesselmann, Markus Grabka, Peter Krause, Simon Kühne, David Richter, Diana Schacht, Paul Schmelzer, Christian Schmitt, Daniel Schnitzlein, Rainer Siegers, Knut Wenzig
You can see the complete information by clicking at the DOI of the original data set http://doi.org/10.5684/soep.v32
Data set information:
Number of units | 113,840 |
Number of variables | 61,902 in 413 data sets |
Data format | STATA, SPSS, SAS, CSV |
MD5 fingerprints
Distribution format SOEP-Core |
zip file | all files |
Stata bilingual | f74125ed9aed0bb9e9619e2a65610a03 | | TXT, 18.11 KB |
Stata German | 040a169b1d7edd43bf93a93eee4feae3 | | TXT, 18.11 KB |
Stata English | 5c6cbdd0b3ae05e8e7ead819113217ee | | TXT, 18.11 KB |
SPSS German | b6b0f3c5e0640621018610fdee9aa5ec | | TXT, 18.11 KB |
SPSS English | 9548052842b3dbf1dffe038b19abb8ba | | TXT, 18.11 KB |
SAS German | cf24e8ab93ee0d41bf83c72fe264a318 | | TXT, 20.23 KB |
SAS English | de3ffe8c282e272b1759452bc7aeb06c | | TXT, 20.23 KB |
CSV | 55d8d8ad4496497a85d9893ecab305f1 | | TXT, 18.11 KB |
GGKBOU | 9c04b470ac58bc648c1eeae1053bc054 | | TXT, 140 Byte |
GGKBOU English | 74d52f8f38388b508fe85aadd9a05499 | | TXT, 140 Byte |
Teaching version | ||
Stata German (teaching) | | TXT, 18.11 KB | |
Stata English (teaching) | | TXT, 18.11 KB | |
SPSS German (teaching) | | TXT, 18.11 KB | |
SPSS English (teaching) | | TXT, 18.11 KB | |
SAS German (teaching) | | TXT, 20.13 KB | |
SAS English (teaching) | | TXT, 20.13 KB |
Distribution format SOEPlong |
zip file |
all files |
Stata bilingual (long) | 008a7040e1e77666c40284b2361c6a6c | | TXT, 0.77 KB |
Stata German (long) | e186efb2a24d06fd0d4b8a5173716177 | | TXT, 0.77 KB |
Stata English (long) | e49fcd648afc46a44a2e2b2365ff6120 | | TXT, 0.77 KB |
SPSS German (long) | 9ff2a34e2775395e435fe2eec9237195 | | TXT, 0.77 KB |
SPSS English (long) | ea000e52a5430744ebacacca760e6583 | | TXT, 0.77 KB |
SAS German (long) | 67cc6d034b8da7b7dbab009b749d57e5 | | TXT, 0.96 KB |
SAS English (long) | 5afbede12fa8f0d71a85fe2862057b68 | | TXT, 0.96 KB |
CSV (long) | 71ec745d7d7ff3cf5dd46954764de99d | | TXT, 0.77 KB |
Publications using this file should refer to the above DOI Find an explanation on the usage of DOI here.and cite one of the following references
1984 - 2015 (Welle BF)
Individual (PAPI) 2015: Field-de Var-de Var-en
Household 2015: Field-de Var-de Var-en
Biography (PAPI) 2015: Field-de Var-de Var-en
Youth (16-17 year-olds) 2015: Field-de Var-de Var-en
Pre-Teen (11-12 year-olds) 2015: Field-de
Mother and Child (Newborns) 2015: Field-de
Mother and Child (2-3-year-olds) 2015: Field-de
Mother and Child (5-6-year-olds) 2015: Field-de
Parents and Child (7-8-year-olds) 2015: Field-de
Mother and Child (9-10-year-olds) 2015: Field-de
Deceased Individual 2015: Field-de
Please find all sample specific questionnaires of this year and all questionnaires of previous years on this site
1) SOEP-Core v32 – Documentation on Biography and Life History Data
3) The 2015 IAB-SOEP Migration Study M2: Sampling Design, Nonresponse, and Weighting Adjustment
5) SOEP-Core v32 – Documentation of the Household-related Meta-dataset HPFAD
8) SOEP-Core v32.1 – Documentation of Person-related Status and Generated Variables in $PGEN
9) SOEP-Core v32 – Documentation of Household-related Status and Generated Variables in $HGEN
12) SOEP-Core v32 – KIDLONG: Pooled Dataset on Children
13) SOEP-Core v32 – Person-related Variables on Children in $KIND
1) Handgreifkraftmessung im Sozio-oekonomischen Panel (SOEP) 2006 und 2008
2) The new IAB-SOEP Migration Sample: an introduction into the methodology and the contents
3) The Request for Record Linkage in the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample
5) The Measurement of Labor Market Entries with SOEP Data: Introduction to the Variable EINSTIEG_ARTK
6) Job submission instructions for the SOEPremote System at DIW Berlin – Update 2014
7) SOEP 2015 – Informationen zu den SOEP-Geocodes in SOEP v32
9) Die Vercodung der offenen Angaben zu den Ausbildungsberufen im Sozio-Oekonomischen Panel
10) Das Studiendesign der IAB-BAMF-SOEP Befragung von Geflüchteten
11) Scales Manual IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany – revised version
13) SOEP Scales Manual (updated for SOEP-Core v32.1)
17) Multi-Itemskalen im SOEP Jugendfragebogen
All documentation for filtering can be found on this page