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 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 German society in 1994/95. Further new samples were added in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2011, and 2012. The survey is constantly being adapted and developed in response to current social developments. The international version contains 95% of all cases surveyed.
Title: Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), Data from 1984-2012
DOI: 10.5684/soep.v29.1
Collection period: 1984-2012
Publication date: March 20, 2014
Principal investigators: Jürgen Schupp, Martin Kroh, Jan Goebel, Simone Bartsch, Marco Giesselmann, Markus Grabka, Peter Krause, Elisabeth Liebau, David Richter, Christian Schmitt, Daniel Schnitzlein, Frauke Peter, Ingrid Tucci
You can see the complete information by clicking at the DOI of the original data set http://dx.doi.org/10.5684/soep.v29
Data set information:
Number of units | 79,199 |
Number of variables | 513 in 6 data sets |
Data format | STATA, SPSS, SAS, CSV |
MD5 fingerprints of the data sets |
Stata German+English | TXT, 268 Byte |
Publications using this file should refer to the above DOI Find an explanation on the usage of DOI here.and cite following references
If you do not exclude the cases of the migration samples in your analysis, then please also cite the following reference
If you do not exclude the cases of the refugee samples in your analysis, please also cite: IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey of refugees (M3-M5), data for the years 2016-2021,
If you use data from the SOEP-LEE2 surveys, please also cite:
If you would like to refer more specifically, please also cite:
HGEN
Errors in the imputation of electricity, heating, and additional expenses for tenants in the current data distribution resulted in values that were too high. These errors also affected the generation of rent including maintenance but excluding heating. The variables affected are: electr$$, heat$$, util$$, rent$$, and frent$$ for the years 2008 to 2012.
The variables typ1hh12 and typ2hh12 changed for two households.
BCPKAL
Also in the 2012 survey year, after the suspension of compulsory military service in Germany, the related calendar information in the individual questionnaire was revised. This revision was made in the original individual data for 2012 but not in the corresponding calendar data—these have now been updated retrospectively for the data distribution v29.
Individual 2012: 2) Individual 2012 Field-de 4) Individual 2012 Field-en
Household (PAPI) 2013: Field-de
Household 2012: 7) Household 2012 Field-de 9) Household 2012 Field-en
Biography 2012: Field-de
Catch-up Individual 2012: Field-de
Youth (16-17 year-olds) 2013: Field-de
Youth (16-17 year-olds) 2012: Field-de
Mother and Child (Newborns) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Mother and Child (2-3-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-de
Mother and Child (5-6-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-de
Parents and Child (7-8-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Mother and Child (9-10-year-olds) 2012: Field-de Field-en
Deceased person 2012: Field-de
Grip Strength 2012: Field-de
Interviewer (PAPI) 2012: Field-de Var-de Var-en
Please find all sample specific questionnaires of this year and all questionnaires of previous years on this site
2) SOEP 2012 – Documentation on Biography and Life History Data for SOEP v29
3) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of the Person-related Meta-dataset PPFAD for SOEP v29
4) SOEP 2012 - Documentation of the Household-related Meta-dataset HPFAD for SOEP v29
5) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of Person-related Status and Generated Variables in PGEN for SOEP v29
6) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of Household-related Status and Generated Variables in HGEN for SOEP v29
8) SOEP 2012 – Documentation on Individual Health Status Variables in HEALTH for SOEP v29
9) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of Person-related Variables on Children in $KIND for SOEP v29
10) SOEP 2012 – Documentation of the Pooled Dataset on Children in $KIDLONG for SOEP v29
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
20) SOEP-CoV: Project and Data Documentation
22) SOEP-Core v34 – PFLEGE: Documentation of Generated Person-level Long-term Care Variables
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