Abstract
Abstract This article highlights the potentials for migration research using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), a longitudinal panel dataset of private households in Germany running since 1984. We provide a concise overview of its basic features, describe the survey contents and research potentials, and demonstrate opportunities to link external data sources to the SOEP thereby presenting its diverse and impactful applications in migration research.
Highlights
Migration has become a common experience throughout the globalized world and a major topic of public and scientific debate
This article highlights the potentials for migration research using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), a longitudinal panel dataset of private households in Germany running since 1984
We provide a concise overview of its basic features, describe the survey contents and research potentials, and demonstrate opportunities to link external data sources to the SOEP thereby presenting its diverse and impactful applications in migration research
Summary
Migration has become a common experience throughout the globalized world and a major topic of public and scientific debate. As migration often extends across multiple generations, evidence-based research on migration calls for longitudinal data that span the life course With such data can researchers identify the causal mechanisms that drive migratory movements and underlie their individual and societal effects. Panel studies have the advantage of low recall error thanks to their prospective longitudinal design (Peters 1988) Because of this, they can track transnational movements across the life course. This article focuses on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a longitudinal survey of randomly sampled households in Germany, and provides an overview of its far-reaching potentials to observe migrant households in Germany (Goebel et al 2019). The SOEP is a unique data source for the study of immigration and integration trajectories in Germany, and provides researchers with reliable data on how immigration has affected the German economy and society over time.
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