Study title

The German Survey “Attitudes and Reported Experiences of the German Welfare State” is a joint project of the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Gothenburg, and the Institute for Social Research, Oslo. The data set has been developed with respect to an extensive comparability with a parallel study conducted in Norway (see Kumlin et al. 2017). Starting in 2015, information of 3,393 respondents from a German population sample was collected in three annually repeated waves until 2017. The main interest of the data collection lies on the temporal change of the data, whereas the sampling design, an online quota sample, does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the underlying German population. The aim of this academic study is to create a high-quality panel data set, focusing on attitudes towards the welfare state within the German population. In addition, questions on political, religious, social and demographic topics were asked.Political participation in the last four years (participation in a demonstration, writing about political issues in a newspaper, online newspaper or blog, member of a political party, member of a trade union, member of another political organization); general social trust; group-related trust (Hartz IV recipients, richest people in Germany, people met for the first time, Germans without migration background, people with migration background from non-European countries, people with migration background from Eastern Europe); interest in politics; frequency of political discussions; frequency of political information; left-right self-ranking; attitude toward political asylum; attitude toward the right to social benefits for migrants; party affiliation; party voted for in the 2013 federal election; other party voted for in the 2013 federal election; actual voting behavior in 2013; party preference (Sunday question); party preference (Sunday question - open); retrospective voting behavior in the 2015 federal election;...