The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) 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 11,000 households, and more than 20,000 persons sampled by the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung. The data provide information on all household members, consisting of Germans living in the Old and New German States, Foreigners, and recent 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. An immigrant sample was added as well to account for the changes that took place in Germany society in 1994/95. Further new samples were added in 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2006. The survey is constantly being adapted and developed in response to current social developments.
Title: German Socio-oeconomic Panel Study (SOEP), data of the years 1984 – 2009
DOI: 10.5684/soep.v26
Collection Period: 1984–2009
Publication Date: 17.09.2010
Principal Investigators: Gert. G. Wagner, Joachim R. Frick, Jürgen Schupp, Silke Anger, Jan Goebel, Markus M. Grabka, Elke Holst, Peter Krause, Martin Kroh, Elisabeth Liebau, Henning Lohmann, Christian Schmitt, C. Katharina Spieß
Data Collector: TNS Infratest Sozialforschung GmbH
Population: Persons living in private households in Germany
Selection method: All samples of SOEP are multi-stage random samples which are regionally clustered. The respondents (households) are selected by random-walk.
Collection mode: The interview methodology of the SOEP is based on a set of pre-tested qustionnaires for households and individuals. Principally an interviewer tries to obtain face-to-face interviews with all members of a given survey household aged 16 years and over. Additionally one person (head of household3) is asked to answer a household related questionnaire covering information on housing, housing costs, and different sources of income. This covers also some questions on children in the household up to 16 years of age, mainly concerning attendance at institutions (kindergarten, elementary school, etc.)
Data set information:
Number of units | 66,189 |
Number of variables | 43,155 in 322 data sets |
Data formats | STATA, SPSS, SAS, CSV |
MD5 fingerprints of every file | Stata German | TXT, 14.06 KB Stata English | TXT, 14.06 KB Stata English+German | TXT, 14.06 KB SPSS German | TXT, 14.06 KB SPSS English | TXT, 14.06 KB SPSS portable German | TXT, 14.06 KB SPSS portable English | TXT, 14.06 KB SAS German | TXT, 15.63 KB SAS English | TXT, 15.63 KB SAS portable German | TXT, 14.06 KB SAS portable English | TXT, 14.06 KB |
Publications:
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
The 2010 data distribution (data for years 1984-2009) has comprehensive improvements, additions, and modifications. For the most recent survey year 2009, it also provides the usual wave-specific data ZPBRUTTO, ZP, ZPKAL, ZPGEN, ZPAGE17, ZHBRUTTO, ZH, ZHGEN, ZKIND and YPLUECKE as well as the updated files with a longitudinal component (PFAD files, biography files, spell data and weighting factors).
1. Beta verson in 'long format'
The SOEP data are being provided for the first time ever as a beta version in "long format" in addition to the standard data format. SOEPlong refers to a compressed form of the SOEP data: rather than being provided as wave-specific individual files, all available years and cohorts are pooled (long format).
2. New Subsample I
As part of the recent SOEP innovations, fieldwork began in fall 2009 on a new subsample (Sample I). The subsample is currently being used to test the effect of different incentive strategies on participation in the SOEP and it will become part of the innovation sample. See SOEPnewsletter 89 (PDF, 1.37 MB)for more on this new sample.
In four randomly assigned groups, the following strategies were used:
The data from the new Sample I has been included in the new release of SOEP data (SOEP, v26), but due to the particular features of the subsample, it does not have an integrated weighting framework with the rest of the SOEP samples. For subsample I we are conducting a mail survey of all non-participants in the four groups. Since this is the first wave of subsample I, we were not able to integrate the biographical information from Sample I into the existing biography files. The same applies to the biographical information in the dataset PPFAD, e.g. the variable MIGBACK is completely set to -2.
Apart from that the following additions and modifications have been made:
3. New and Renamed Datasets
4. New Variables
4.1 Dataset $HGEN
Two new variables describing the quality of the dwelling:
4.2 Dataset $PEQUIV:
4.3 Dataset $HBRUTTO - Calender Year of Interview
5. Revised Variables
5.1 Datasets $HGEN
5.2 Datasets $KIND – KIDLONG
5.3 Datasets BIOMARSM/BIOMARSY
5.4 Dataset BIOTWIN
The dataset BIOTWIN contains 100 additional cases since wave Z. This considerable increase in case numbers is due to an adjustment in the data generation procedure: In contrast to the previous generation, all siblings with an identical year of birth are consdered twins under the condition that the information on the month of birth remains missing. This less restricitve generation is based on the assumption that two separate births in a single calendar year remain rare occurences. Nevertheless, the number of false positives in this group with a missing month of birth is likely to exceed the BIOTWIN average. Hence a new value label was introduced with the variable INFOTWIN in order to flag these twin groups for the user (Code "6": Coverage since 2007, congruent year of birth, missing month; see in contrast to this code "5": Coverage since 2007, congruent year & month of birth).
In its current state (wave Z) the dataset BIOTWIN covers 250 sets of twins and 5 sets of triplets.
infotwin:
[1] Twins - Not in 2006 (gen.)
[2] Twins - 2006 (Answer Not Verifiable)
[3] Twins - 2006 (Answer Refused)
[4] Twins - 2006 (Answer Validated)
[5] Twins - since 2007 (gen.)
[6] Twins - since 2007 (gen.)
5.5 Minor bugs fixed
1984-2009 (Wave Z)
Jan. 6, 2011 |
There was a problem in the assignment of the correct current household number in 3% of the children in the generated longitudinal dataset KIDLONG. The variable HHNRAKT has been corrected accordingly. Please contact soepmail@diw.de if you use the KIDLONG dataset. We will provide an individualized method of downloading the corrected version for both the 100% dataset for the EEA countries and the 95% version available for use worldwide.
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Survey Instruments 2009: Field-de
Please find all sample specific questionnaires of this year and all questionnaires of previous years on this site
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
21) SOEP-CoV: Project and Data Documentation
25) SOEP-Core v36: Codebook for the EU-SILC-like panel for Germany based on the SOEP
All documentation for filtering can be found on this page