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...

"Die meisten Menschen sind die meiste Zeit über glücklich" stellt in einer Zusammenfassung vieler empirischer Studien Biswas-Diener (2009) fest. Sogar nach einschneidenden Negativerlebnissen wie Arbeitslosigkeit oder dem Verlust des Partners passen sich die meisten Menschen recht schnell an...

The German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) offers the rare opportunity to look at patterns of given names amongst a representative sample of more than 50,000 people born since 1900. This article develops an exemplary picture of typical frequency distributions for given names and their...

Since it is still unclear to what extent time allocation retrospectively reported in questionnaires, reflects people's actual behavior, examining the accuracy of responses to time use survey questions is of crucial importance. We analyze the congruence of time use information assessed through...

Self-reported measures of health are generally treated as weak measures of respondents' objective health status. On the other hand, most surveys use self-reported health to measure health status and to determine the effects of a range of other socio-economic characteristics of the local...

There are strong two-way links between parent and child happiness (life satisfaction), even for 'children' who have grown up, moved to their own home and partnered themselves. German panel evidence shows that transmission of (un)happiness from parents to children is partly due to transmission of...

Interest in the effects of sleeping behavior on health and performance is continuously increasing - both in research and with the general public. Ecologically valid investigations of this research topic necessitate the measurement of sleep within people's natural living contexts. We present...

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...

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...

This paper describes key characteristics of SOEP users, measures their satisfaction with SOEP service, and studies their habits in the use of the SOEP data. The analysis is based primarily on data from the SOEP user surveys conducted in 2004, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Older user surveys (in the...