About
GeoLAB is part of the REGIO DATA project of the Leibniz ScienceCampus SOEP RegioHub, a cooperation between Bielefeld University and DIW Berlin.
The Campus is funded by the Leibniz Association. It was established in 2020 and was granted a second four-year funding period beginning in October 2024. Its data basis is the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
Thematic focus of the Leibniz ScienceCampus SOEP RegioHub
Living conditions in Germany today show increasing and rapidly changing regional disparities in structural, demographic and economic terms. These disparities often take the form of unequal access to health care, childcare, education and other public services, and of regional differences in labour-market opportunities, business climate, housing and transport infrastructure. Researchers at the Leibniz ScienceCampus investigate how these regional social and economic opportunities shape expectations, political attitudes, preferences and behaviour, and how they thereby exacerbate or mitigate social inequality, weaken or strengthen social cohesion, and fuel or ease political conflict and radicalisation.
Thematic focus of the REGIO DATA project
The REGIO DATA project aims to improve access to regionalised SOEP data and the support for researchers who use it. Building on a successful first phase, which established an initial teaching and research infrastructure, the second phase launched GeoLAB. GeoLAB will serve as a central node, enabling secure remote access to regionalised SOEP data from anywhere and overcoming the security and logistical problems that come with physical access restrictions.
Beyond data access, GeoLAB offers comprehensive support for research with geospatial and survey data. Key features include
- GeoDB for exploring regional indicators,
- the SOEP Variable Finder for finding SOEP survey variables,
- best-practice documentation with research manuals and code for data integration,
- and an expanded software toolbox with R packages for geospatial analysis.
Team
GeoLAB is developed in the REGIO DATA project at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University, in the Working Group Applied Social Data Science (Research and Teaching Unit 2: Methods of Empirical Social Research).
Prof. Dr. Simon Kühne
Professorship for Social Data Science · principal investigator of REGIO DATA · scientific coordinator of the Leibniz ScienceCampus
Dr. Kerstin Ostermann
Postdoctoral researcher, Methods of Empirical Social Research · spatial, labour and neighbourhood sociology · also at the IAB
The Leibniz ScienceCampus SOEP RegioHub lists everyone working at the Campus, including the researchers whose projects this infrastructure serves. The code of both finders is open source and archived with a DOI; the software toolbox collects the R packages developed at the Campus.