TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Rohrer, Julia
AU  - Bruemmer, Martin
AU  - Schupp, Jürgen
AU  - Wagner, Gert G.
        TI  - Worries across Time and Age in Germany: Bringing Together Open- and Close-Ended Questions
        PY  - 2017/Jun/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 10861
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp10861
        AB  - We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War, with a considerable number of respondents also referring to the Iraq war in their text responses. Furthermore, we found that - controlling for these historical effects - worries about various topics such as health and the general economic situation increase with age. With increasing age, respondents also became more likely to answer the open-ended question. This suggests that the age increases in worries we found are not merely a result of an age-biased choice of worry items, but instead also hold for worries self-generated by the respondents. 
        KW  - worries
KW  - German Socio-Economic Panel Study
KW  - SOEP
KW  - life course
KW  - satisfaction
        ER  -