Topic Well-being

Network analysis of subjective well-being and domain satisfaction

How are different components of subjective well-being (SWB) concurrently and prospectively related to each other? Several studies already addressed this research question. However, they suffer from a combination of important limitations such as exclusive attention on cognitive or affective indicators of SWB, over-reliance on cross-sectional data, or no explicit consideration of age effects or...

High-profile crime and perceived public safety: evidence from Cologne's New Year's Eve in 2015

joint with Alexander Schmidt-Catran, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt This study analyses the impact of a high-profile crime event on perceived public safety. At the 2015 New Year's Eve celebrations in Cologne (NYE), Germany, refugees allegedly committed thousands of crimes, ranging from theft to sexual assault. The widespread media coverage of these incidents has made a shift in the publics’...

Hit where it hurts: Healthcare access and Intimate Partner Violence

Restrictions to Civil Liberties in a Pandemic and Satisfaction with Democracy

Unexpected crises, such as armed conflicts, natural disasters and pandemics require immediate government decisions on how to act to protect the population. The COVID-19 pandemic was the worst sudden onset global crisis since the Second World War, and highlighted tension between civil liberties and public health objectives. How did attitudes towards democracy respond to restrictive policy...

The Transition to Grandparenthood: No Consistent Evidence for Change in the Big Five Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction

Intergenerational relations have received close attention in the context of population aging and increased childcare provision by grandparents. However, few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent. In a preregistered test of grandparenthood as a developmental task in middle and older adulthood, we used representative panel data from the Netherlands (N = 563) ...

Family Care during the First COVID-19 Lockdown in Germany: Longitudinal Evidence on Consequences for the Well-Being of Caregivers

We examine changes in the well-being of family caregivers during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the SOEP-CoV study. The COVID-19 pandemic posed an extraordinary challenge for family caregivers, as care recipients are a high-risk group requiring special protection, and professional care services were severely cut back. ...

Chronic disease onset and wellbeing. Analyzing level, trend effects, and exploring the role of healthcare access

Objectives: Experiencing the onset of a chronic disease is a major life event impacting living conditions and wellbeing. Using longitudinal data, this study investigates immediate and trend impacts of chronic disease onset on life satisfaction and health satisfaction. It further examines, whether healthcare access buffers the immediate wellbeing reduction after disease onset.Methods: Data were...

Long term care and migration

Organizing long-term care (LTC) is one of the most pressing challenges for the coming years, both societally and politically. Across OECD countries, the proportion of individuals aged 80 and above will increase from an average of nearly five to almost ten percent of the population by 2050 (OECD, 2020). This rapid aging will have sizable implications for the demand and provision of LTC. The issue...

Higher retirement age has negative health effects

An introduction to respondent-driven sampling (RDS) with case studies

Declining response rates have made traditional, probability-based sampling methods more resource-intensive and thus more expensive. Studies of population subgroups are particularly vulnerable to this trend, as smaller group sizes as well as other factors often make these groups "hard-to-reach" or "hard-to-survey". In response, researchers have increasingly relied on network...