Twenty-Five Years of the German Socio-Economic Panel - An Infrastructure Project for Empirical Social and Economic Research in Germany

The longitudinal German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study has been providing microdata for social, behavioral, and economic research for over 25 years. This paper presents an overview of this nationally and internationally important infrastructural facility for empirical social research, and shows that SOEP data are of key sociological interest in two respects. Firstly, they allow for annual representative situation analyses, which contribute to describing social change in Germany. Secondly, the data offer a basis for testing theoretical explanations of the behavior of individuals, households, groups and societies, thereby providing a strong empirical foundation for theory building. Since 1988, papers based on SOEP data have been published regularly in the Zeitschrift fur Soziologic. It is shown here that not only has the percentage of quantitative empirical papers in ZfS increased constantly over the last 20 years, but also that the SOEP's contribution to the "totat impact" of the journal has risen continually over this period. With 34 papers, the SOEP is now by far the most important microdata set for quantitatively oriented papers in the Zeitschrift fur Soziologie.