SOECBIAS-COVREF Data Set

The SOECBIAS-COVREF data set is an output of two research projects: The interdisciplinary research project SOECBIAS, funded by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in Germany and the research project COVREF, funded by the German Research Foundation, both conducted at the Universität Hamburg. SOECBIAS started in May 2019 and ended in December 2021 and studied income perceptions and redistributive preferences combining inequality research with social policy and welfare state research in economics and sociology. SOECBIAS addressed three main questions: How do Europeans perceive national and European social policy? What explains the perception of one’s own income position within the EU income distribution? What are the consequences of these perceptions for the assessment of redistribution measures?
Since the SOECBIAS survey period overlapped with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic it became an additional focus of the project and evolved into a further research project (COVREF) which started in June 2022 and ended in June 2024. This research project focused on the individual affectedness by the COVID-19 pandemic from an objective and subjective point of view. The two leading questions for COVREF were: What influence do objectively measurable factors like illness, job loss or loss of income during the COVID-19 pandemic have on the subjective assessment of economic affectedness and the perception of one’s own income position? What impact do comparisons with reference groups or reference points have on the perception and assessment of economic affectedness?