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 1671, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

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: 27 p.
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.560847.de/dp1671.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)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1671

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().