Researchers in Germany and abroad are invited to submit proposals for the next round of the SOEP Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). For those not yet familiar with SOEP-IS, this unique random sample of German households (N = 2,800 households with about 4,000 respondents) offers great potential as a source of household micro-data, particularly for researchers seeking information that is not available in SOEP-Core—for example, specific information on households or on people’s opinions.
SOEP-IS can accommodate not only short-term experiments but also longer-term survey modules that are not suitable for SOEP-Core, whether because the survey instruments are still relatively new or because of the specific issues dealt with in the research. Up to now, the SOEP-IS has included (complex) economic behavioral experiments, Implicit Association Tests (IAT), and complex procedures to measure time use (Day Reconstruction Method, DRM).
The SOEP-IS was launched in 2011, and each year since then, researchers at universities and research institutes worldwide have been invited to submit proposals for inclusion in the subsequent year’s survey. A competitive referee process is conducted to select the “best” research questions and operationalizations for implementation in the SOEP-IS. The SOEP Research Data Center distributes the SOEP-IS data to external users as an independent dataset.
Data from SOEP-IS modules are provided exclusively to the researchers who submitted the respective proposals for an initial 12-month period. After this embargo has ended, the data are released to the entire SOEP user community for secondary analysis.
You can find an overview of the innovation modules conducted so far in our SOEP-IS Companion (http://www.diw.de/soep-is-mod).
As a new technical feature, the 2014 SOEP-IS premiered the use of 111 smart phones for data collection using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). If you have an idea for using ESM in the SOEP-IS, please contact us for details.
Proposals can be submitted by email to the SOEP survey management at: soep-is@diw.de.
A subcommittee of the SOEP Survey Committee will then evaluate and rate the relevance and significance of the proposed questions. If the proposed project already has funding from the DFG or other funding agencies, this step of external evaluation will be skipped. Since projects funded by the DFG and other organizations providing research funding also require a guarantee of survey methodological feasibility, interested researchers should contact SOEP Survey Management before submitting an application for funding.
All proposals are evaluated according to scientific quality, suitability, feasibility, and costs. Specifically, the following considerations are relevant:
Scientific quality and relevance
Suitability for the SOEP Innovation Sample
Feasibility
Costs for SOEP-IS
The SOEP-IS is an infrastructure for the international research community. Survey questions from accepted proposals will be introduced into SOEP-IS without any additional costs.
If there is a need to integrate additional subsamples into the SOEP-IS, external funding is expected to be raised by the proposer.
Similarly, if behavioral experiments are part of a proposal, or if non-survey contents are part of a proposal (e.g., biomarkers), external funding is expected to be raised by the proposer.
Researchers interested in submitting questions should contact SOEP Survey Management by May 31 to present their proposal. If the project is determined to be viable from a survey methodology perspective, an official application procedure will follow. The official application must be received by June 30. The survey will be conducted between March and June of the following year. Send us your proposal!
Applications, questions and notes should be submitted in English to soep-is@diw.de.