The Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is a multidisciplinary study that allows for the investigation of how a multitude of health status factors as well as many other social and economic outcomes interplay. The sample consists of 1,600 participants aged 60 to 80, and 600 participants aged 20 to...

Since the new millennium, research in the field of personality development has focused on the stability and change of basic personality traits. Motivational aspects of personality and their longitudinal association with basic traits have received comparably little attention. In this...

Das Papier geht der Frage nach, ob sich Berufspolitikerinnen und Berufspolitiker in ihren Risikoeinstellungen systematisch von der allgemeinen Bevölkerung unterscheiden. In einer schriftlichen Befragung von Mitgliedern des 17. Deutschen Bundestags wurde Ende 2011 die Risikoeinstellungen...

The article analyzes the question of whether career politicians differ systematically from the general population in terms of their attitudes toward risk. A written survey of members of the 17th German Bundestag in late 2011 identified their risk attitudes, and the survey data was set in...

Like many medical studies, the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is based on a non-random convenience sample of self-recruited participants. To study processes of selectivity in BASE-II, we used an identical questionnaire to compare BASE-II with a large, representative reference study, the German...

The results of a resurvey of non-respondents to the SOEP study carried out in 2006 show that this special effort of reinterviewing was relatively ineffective in two respects. First, the rate of successful conversions of passive to active respondents was low (less than 20 percent). Second, the...

In den Sozialwissenschaften spielt die sogenannte Citizen Science, also der Einbezug von an Wissenschaft interessierte Bürgerinnen und Bürgern in wissenschaftliche Erhebungen als Methode empirischer Sozialforschung bislang keine Rolle. Freilich sind die in der Politik zunehmend häufiger...

Dieses Papier charakterisiert die SOEP-Nutzer, beschreibt ihre Zufriedenheit mit dem SOEP-Service und untersucht ihre Nutzungsgewohnheiten bei der Arbeit mit den Daten. Die Untersuchungen bauen primär auf den Daten der SOEP-Nutzerbefragungen 2004, 2011, 2012 und 2013 auf. Ältere...

How socio-cultural contexts shape individual functioning is of prime interest for psychological inquiry. Secular increases favoring later-born cohorts in fluid intelligence measures are widely documented for young adults. In the current study, we quantify such trends in old age using data from...

Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the lifespan can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or divergent, trajectories across domains and...