The SOEP is part of the presentation “Research in Germany—Challenges and Innovations of Longitudinal Data Resources for the Social Sciences” at the Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Las Vegas in August 2011. SOEP, SHARE, PAIRFAM, and NEPS are the four major large-scale longitudinal studies in the German social sciences that provide a unique data infrastructure on important topics in modern societies, such as inequality, aging, living arrangements, and education.

These ambitious projects are forming a new basis for innovative, cross-national, and interdisciplinary research as they all make their comprehensive data available to the scientific community. At the ASA Congress 2011, they will jointly present their designs and data to the American professional audience and demonstrate their potential for further analyses and new cooperation opportunities with researchers in the United States (see the invitation to a reception on August 21, 2011). Jürgen Schupp will give an overview of the potentials for research using the SOEP in comparative longitudinal analysis in Sociology.