PRI Brown Bag Speaker Series - Gert G. Wagner

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"The Innovation Sample: Keeping Household Panel Studies Fresh for a New Generation of Research"

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) recently completed its 30th year of data collection. As one the longest running household panel study in the world, the SOEP provides a rich data source - with sociologists, demographers, economists, psychologists, etc. publishing over 400 papers a year off the data while also pushing govt statistics and policy. Pushing beyond 50,000 households (with oversampling of immigrant populations), the study recently opened a new Innovation Sample of nearly 5,000 people in 3,450 households who have already provided 5 or 15 years of longitudinal data. This sample is suitable for short-term experiments and testing of long-term surveys —for instance, because they require instruments that are not yet established, deal with very specific research interests, or increase the risk of non-response. The SOEP-IS is open for researchers at universities and research institutions worldwide to conduct particularly innovative research projects that seed innovations in both survey methodology and thematic research - the most promising of which are then considered for integration into the main sample.

Gert G. Wagner is Professor of Economics at the Berlin University of Technology, chairman of The Social Advisory Council (Sozialbeirat) and German Council for Social and Economic Data. As a long-time director of the SOEP, he will share insights into how household panel studies are evolving, how the current and future data may facilitate inquiry in specific topics of interest at PSU.