Summary: What factors determine the chances of being appointed to a chair in Germany? We propose to derive hypotheses from discrimination theory, social and human capital theory, and the signaling approach. In a survey we sampled scholars from mathematics, law and sociology who had completed their Habilitation ("second book") from 1985 and 2005 at West German universities. A young age at the time of completion of the Habilitation is beneficial across all disciplines. In sociology, the number of publications included in the Science Citation Index is the most important factor in attaining a chair, and women are at an advantage when they face the same conditions as do men. In the field of law, parents' years of education have a significant impact on success, as has having a highly respected mentor. In mathematics, the chances of getting a professorship increase significantly with high occupational prestige of the parents, the share of time spent in research, the specialty of applied mathematics, or having a mentor with a high reputation. Keywords

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An electronic version of this book [978-1-4473-2611-3] is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.

This contribution presents the Standard Stress Scale (SSS), a new scale that has been specially developed to meet the requirements of multicohort panel studies-such as the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS)-that refer to the whole life course. Accordingly, the SSS is consistently applicable for different age groups from 14 years old onwards and is also suitable for a wide range of people, irrespective of their stage in life and employment situation. The items are applicable to (university) students; employed, unemployed, and self-employed people; housewives and -husbands; old-age pensioners; and so forth. To obtain the final 11-item Standard Stress Scale (SSS), 35 questions regarding stressful life situations, social stress, daily distress, anxiety about the future, and other stresses and strains were developed following the theoretical approach of the effort-reward imbalance model (ERI) and the demand-control model. These 35 items were pretested with different subsamples-such as students in different school types, university students, and adults-using self-administered questionnaires. The total sample of the pretest includes 372 respondents. All of the 35 original questions had a small item-nonresponse rate and a good variance among respondents. Using factor analyses, the questions with the highest factor loading in each of the dimensions were used to represent the final 11-item SSS. In some cases, when the questions with the highest loading did not perform well in the cognitive pretest, the item with the second-highest loading was chosen instead. Although the most distinct items were selected, the final 11 items of the SSS show good reliability values. The Cronbach's Alpha values vary in a range in all subsamples from 0.58 for the unemployed to 0.66 for students. In addition, further analyses show a high correlation of the final SSS with self-rated health. The use of the SSS is free of charge but has to be cited using this publication.

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FS method can, under certain methodological conditions, be used among older adults especially when the topic of the survey is relevant to their daily lives.