The Research Data Center (RDC) of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract

Based on recommendations from the “Commission to Improve the Informational Infrastructure (KVI)”, the Council for Social and Economic Data (RatSWD) has issued guidelines for Germany’s new Research Data Centers (RDCs, Forschungsdatenzentren). The RatSWD has been tasked by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research with “improving data use and data access for empirical research”. 1 While at the beginning of the process the RDCs were mainly created for agencies that collect official statistical data and administrative register data and that decided, based on these recommendations, to make their data available to the scientific community for research purposes, the SOEP Research Data Center has a somewhat different history – mainly because SOEP is driven by academic research goals. 2 The Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), the largest longitudinal survey of private households in Germany, was founded in 1982 as a subproject of the German Research Foundation’s (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) Collaborative Research Center 3 (Sfb3) “Microanalytic Foundations of Social Policy”. SOEP was and still remains a research-based survey, in contrast to the official statistical agencies, and its goal is to improve the range and quality of data available for research on a wide range of social issues and contexts. Providing and distributing user-friendly data to a broad group of German and international scholars has always been among SOEP’s central tasks. In 2001, the Bund-Lander Commission for Educational Planning and Research Promotion (BLK, now the Joint Science Conference, GWK) recognized SOEP’s importance for Germany’s “research infrastructure”. Since 2002, SOEP – which had been located at DIW Berlin since the mid-1980s – has been funded as a service facility by the federal government and the German states (Bundeslander). Since that time SOEP has been an independent member of