Social scientists and media commentators have expressed concern that Western countries are becoming two-thirds societies in which two-thirds enjoy the benefits of affluence, while one-third are locked into poverty or near-poverty. This paper, based on economic panel data, tests the two-thirds...

What has happened to incomes, inequality and satisfaction with living standards in the first stage of transition from a communist command economy to a market economy in East Germany? This paper tests six hypotheses about the transition to capitalism. Contrary to expectations, real incomes went...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (N=6950), this paper analyses equivalent income mobility in West Germany, 1984-93. Four hypotheses, derived from recent North American research and from sociological theory (stratification theory) are tested. They are: 1. that in West Germany, as...

Im Januar des Jahres 2008 begann die Feldarbeit der 25. Welle des SOEP. Im Jahr 2009 werden damit etwa 2 500 anonymisierte Datensätze von Personen zur Auswertung zur Verfügung stehen, die seit 1984 ununterbrochen an 25 Befragungen in den westdeutschen SOEP-Teilstichproben A und B teilgenommen...

An adequate theory of Life Satisfaction (LS) needs to take account of both factors that tend to stabilise LS and those that change it. The most widely accepted theory in the recent past - set-point theory - focussed solely on stability (Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Lykken and Tellegen, 1996). That...

Set-point theory has dominated the field of subjective well-being (SWB). It has served as a classic Kuhn research paradigm, being extended and refined for thirty years totake in new results. The central plank of the theory is that adult set-points do not change, except just temporarily in the...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper assesses the relationship between life satisfaction and religious practice. The main new result here is longitudinal. It is shown that individuals who become more religious over time record long term gains in life...

Using data from national socio-economic panel surveys in Australia, Britain and Germany, this paper analyzes the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that, in all three countries, preferences and choices relating to life goals/values,...