the german socio-economic panel study (soep) - scope, evolution and enhancements（德国社会经济研究小组(soep)范围、进化和增强）.pdfVIP

European Data Watch This section will offer descriptions as well as discussions of data sources that may be of interest to social scientists engaged in empirical research or teaching courses that include empirical investigations performed by students. The purpose is to describe the information in the data source, to give examples of questions tackled with the data and to tell how to access the data for research and teaching. We will start with data from German speaking countries that allow international comparative research. While most of the data will be at the micro level (indivi- duals, households, or firms), more aggregate data and meta data (for regions, industries, or nations) will be included, too. Suggestions for data sources to be described in future columns (or comments on past columns) should be send to: Joachim Wagner, University of Lueneburg, Institute of Economics, Campus 4.210, 21332 Lueneburg, Germany, or e-mailed to wagner@uni-lueneburg.de. The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) – Scope, Evolution and Enhancements By Gert G. Wagner, Joachim R. Frick, and Ju¨rgen Schupp* For over a century, empirical research in the social sciences has been based not on data collected by researchers – as is the case in the natural sciences – but on official statistics. Thus, sociologists and economists, for example, * We are grateful to Dean R. Lillard (PAM; Cornell University) and Stephen P. Jen- kins (ISER, University of Essex) for comments on a first draft of this paper. All remain- ing errors, in particular gaps in our descriptions of other studies, are our own. We would like to emphasize that this paper is the result of teamwork of the SOEP-group in Berlin and the fieldwork agency TNS Infratest Sozialforschung Munich (Managing director Ber