Introduction to the special issue “Understanding social dynamics: 20 years of the swiss household panel”

Twenty years ago, with the launch of the first Swiss Household Panel (SHP) sample, social science in Switzerland embarked on a great adventure. After having evaluated that the social sciences’s development was characterized by “a number of structural deficits”, Swiss researchers and institutions had to change their mindset – from the era of the lonely researcher to interdisciplinary, cooperative research Switzerland and realise that, for the social sciences, data collection, databases and data documentation centers are the functional equivalent to the laboratories and equipment the natural sciences use. The year was 1999. In 1999, in Switzerland, social science longitudinal surveys were particularly rare. It took the initiative and perseverance of visionaries to make the SHP a reality. Twenty years later, more than 2,000 researchers and students have used and continue to use SHP data. To date, those scholars have published almost 800 scientific publications; the SHP has gained an international reputation and