Unemployment and Wellbeing

The German Job Search Panel (GJSP) is a new survey that focuses on job seekers around the time of job loss. Unlike household panel datasets that survey subjects on a yearly basis, participants of the GJSP are interviewed every month using a novel smartphone app. The focus of the survey is on subjective well-being and health. It also comprises a wide range of further economically and psychologically relevant variables and may be linked to job seekers’ administrative records. The talk presents the main features of the GJSP as a new source of data being particularly suited for the analysis of unemployment and related issues. It also uses the example of the GJSP to discuss selective participation in a smartphone-based survey as well as experimental results on the effectiveness of different modes of inviting participants to such a survey. Finally, the presentation shows how the GJSP will contribute to studying effects of unemployment on different facets of well-being by means of a preliminary data analysis.