Abstract

The purpose of the two-wave panel study ‘lidA – leben in der Arbeit. German cohort study on work, age and health’ was to examine the relationship between work, health and work participation among ageing employees in Germany. It comprises a representative sample of persons who were born in 1959 and 1965 and were employed on 31 December 2009. They were questioned personally in the years 2011 (wave 1; N = 6,585) and 2014 (wave 2; N = 4,244). The study sample was drawn from the ‘Integrated Employment Biographies’, a dataset that includes all employees in Germany subject to social security, covering more than 80 percent of the German working population. The lidA data sets contains information on current employment characteristics, work demands, workloads, subjective health indicators, socio-economic status, household context, is using a number of establishes concepts and scales and allowing cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. At wave one, 65 percent of the participants work full-time; these numbers are slightly decreasing in wave two (63 percent). The jobs of the participants are less characterised by manual labour; only twelve percent report mainly physical work tasks. Regarding the individual health status, in the first wave, a smaller share of the older cohort (born in 1959) than the younger cohort (born in 1965) reports a good or very good health status. The numbers again are slightly lower in wave two. The range of publications demonstrates the analytic potential of the lidA data set, covering e.g. analysis about the relationship between individual psychosocial working conditions and mental health status or the question, whether there is a connexion to depressive symptoms for women working in male-dominated professions. The lidA dataset is now available as a Scientific Use File for the Scientific Community provided by the Research Data Centre of the Federal Employment Agency at the Institute for Employment Research.