The Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) was held this year at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. About 5,000 participants poured into “Sin City” between August 20 and 23, 2011, to exchange their views and thoughts on “Social Conflict: Multiple Dimensions and Arenas” – the meeting’s theme.

As part of the collaborative marketing project “Research in Germany”, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) had an information booth in the exhibition hall during the conference and hosted a reception on “Longitudinal Data Resources for the Social Sciences” on the evening of August 21, 2011. Here, four large-scale German panel studies jointly presented their design and data to the scientific community:

• The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is a wide-ranging representative longitudinal study of private households. Some of the many topics include household composition, occupational biographies, employment, earnings, health and satisfaction indicators. At the ASA meeting, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schupp and Ms Anne Busch presented SOEP.
• The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks, was presented by Dr. Martina Brandt.
• Prof. Dr. Bernhard Nauck and Dr. Daniel Fuß represented the German Family Panel pairfam (Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics) in Las Vegas. It is a representative, multidisciplinary, longitudinal study for researching partner and family dynamics in Germany.
• The National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) collects longitudinal data on the development of competencies, educational processes and decisions, and returns to education throughout the life span. At the congress, Dr. Jutta von Maurice and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Schneider presented the project.

About 80 attendees listened to the introductory speech by Prof. Hannah Brückner of Yale University. The participants then had the chance to learn more about the different panel studies in poster sessions and in individual talks with the project’s representatives, giving both sides ample opportunity to get in touch and discuss possible future research collaborations.

Throughout the conference some 130 visitors, among them many senior scientists, also came to the information booth to talk to their German peers. The representatives of the DFG and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) were able to give interested visitors further information on the German research landscape and funding opportunities.

Both the American and international visitors to the booth and the reception widely appreciated the presence of “Research in Germany” at the ASA annual meeting. As one participant put it, “it was a great opportunity to learn about ongoing research projects in Germany and to meet new people who may be prospective colleagues and collaborators.”

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