Worries across Time and Age in Germany: Bringing Together Open- and Close-Ended Questions

Julia M. Rohrer, Martin Bruemmer, Jürgen Schupp and Gert Wagner

No 918, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War, with a considerable number of respondents also referring to the Iraq war in their text responses. Furthermore, we found that – controlling for these historical effects – worries about various topics such as health and the general economic situation increase with age. With increasing age, respondents also became more likely to answer the open-ended question. This suggests that the age increases in worries we found are not merely a result of an age-biased choice of worry items, but instead also hold for worries self-generated by the respondents.

Keywords: Life course; worries; satisfaction; German Socio-Economic Panel Study; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C83 I31 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 p.
Date: 2017
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https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.561412.de/diw_sp0918.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Worries across Time and Age in Germany: Bringing Together Open- and Close-Ended Questions (2017)
Working Paper: Worries across Time and Age in Germany: Bringing Together Open- and Close-Ended Questions (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp918

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