Andrea Hense is research associate at the Faculty of Sociology at the Bielefeld University in Germany. She is member of the transdisciplinary research network “Reporting on socioeconomic development in Germany” (soeb) and the collaborative research centre SFB 882 “From Heterogeneities to Inequalities”. Her research interests focus on social inequalities, atypical employment, life courses, and mixed methods. The soeb-network (www.soeb.de) seeks to contribute to the development of a science-based reporting on social inequality and to improve the understanding of social change in Germany. Within this framework, she analyses the causes and consequences of self-perceived job and income insecurities. She developed a theory-guided socio-structural explanatory model of self-perceived precarity and tested it empirically and still will analyse the impact of self-perceived precarity on marriages and divorces. The main goal of the SFB (www.sfb882.uni-bielefeld.de/en) is to analyse mechanisms that generate social inequalities. Within this framework, she analyses how and why temporary layoffs arise and examines the impact of an interrupted membership in an employing organization upon inequality over time. Thus, different mechanisms that give rise to inequality are analyzed using a mixed-method design.