In the historiography, older women in post-war West Germany have mainly been depicted as passive, as embodiments of a contaminated past and a brake on cultural change. This contribution to the data set challenges these stereotypical narratives by investigating quantitative and qualitative social data from the BOLSA (Bonn Longitudinal Study of Aging) in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social inequality. The results of our correspondence analysis show that women aged over sixty had more active lifestyles than commonly assumed. They also compensated for their lower economic and cultural capital by investing in higher social and symbolic capital. This was particularly pronounced in the case of unmarried elderly women.
The data is published here as a follow-up to the article of the same name by Christina von Hodenberg and Pascal Siegers in the journal ‘Geschichte und Gesellschaft’ (History and Society), vol. 48, 2022, pp. 1-30. The data is based on the creation of a data set for the Bonn Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which was conducted at the University of Bonn between 1967 and 1984 under the direction of Hans Thomae and Ursula Lehr. All files, audio tapes and data were digitised between 2015 and 2018 and transferred to a digital archive at the Historical Data Centre Saxony-Anhalt at the University of Halle-Wittenberg (https://bolsa.uni-halle.de/). Christoph Rott and his team at the University of Heidelberg recoded the existing SPSS data set. It is published in an anonymised and abridged version by the Historical Data Centre and was edited and transformed for correspondence analysis by Pascal Siegers. Pascal Siegers' syntax for the analysis is published here, together with the postprint of the research article from 2022. The article contains a detailed description of the data set, methodological approach, and results.