Abstract
The introductory chapter discusses the benefits and challenges of the panel design, among them the possibility to control for unobserved heterogeneity, but also the problems of keeping a panel representative over time. Using typical examples from recent journal articles, it shows that panel data are used not only for the analysis of individual change, but also for the analysis of overall trends. Correspondingly, statistical models for panel data focus either on the change or the level of a dependent variable Y over time. Y can be either continuous or categorical. The chapter concludes with an outline of the following chapters and a summary of the methodological prerequisites a reader should have to benefit from working with this textbook.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, it is true that a cross-sectional survey can also ask retrospective questions and in doing so measure what has changed since some former point in time. However, the amount of retrospective information is usually quite limited and always prone to recall bias.
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Acknowledgements
This text has a long history and parts of it have served as background literature in lectures, seminars, and workshops both in Cologne and in other places. We thank the participants of these courses for their questions and comments, which helped us to formulate our ideas more precisely and hopefully in a more coherent form. Our special thanks go to our colleagues Josef Brüderl, Kenneth Bollen, Romana Careja, Marco Gießelmann, Achim Goerres, Heiner Meulemann, Henning Lohmann, Luis Maldonado, Ulrich Pötter, Götz Rohwer, and Hawal Shamon who discussed numerous versions of this text with us and contributed valuable improvements. Thorsten Meiser, Ingo Rohlfing, Elmar Schlüter, and Dirk Temme provided helpful literature references from their field of methodological expertise. A special word of thanks goes to all the people that supported our intention to write an applied textbook introducing panel analysis with real research examples from scholarly journals. Helmut Dietl, Bernd Fitzenberger, Geoffrey Garrett, Karsten Hank, Guido Heineck, David Johnson, Markus Klein, Richard Lucas, Pasi Moisio, Stephanie Moller, and John Stephens provided us with their data. Some of them will be used in this textbook, the rest will be provided on the web site for secondary analysis. We especially like to thank Jan Goebel at the Research Data Center of the SOEP and Heather Laurie at the Institute for Social and Economic Research for the permission to use anonymized versions of SOEP and BHPS data in our textbook. Evelyn Funk, Claudia Ubben, and Ravena Penning helped with typesetting the manuscript and producing tables, figures, and the index. Donatas Akmanavičius at VTeX Book Production did the final editing. Finally, Joscha Dick rewrote all our Stata syntax files to publish them on the book’s web site. Martin Spitzenpfeil prepared the data files that are available for secondary analysis on the web site. He also programmed Excel spreadsheets to illustrate examples from Sect. 7.2.
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Andreß, HJ., Golsch, K., Schmidt, A.W. (2013). Introduction. In: Applied Panel Data Analysis for Economic and Social Surveys. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32914-2_1
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