Huidige onderzoeksprojecten

Het Complexe Samenspel tussen Genen, Families en Scholen (NWO VENI-beurs)

Politici, beleidsmakers en wetenschappers hebben diverse onderwijsveranderingen voorgesteld om gelijkere kansen te scheppen in het onderwijs tussen kinderen uit verschillende sociale milieus. Zo wordt regelmatig geopperd dat het beter voor de kansengelijkheid zou zijn als kinderen op latere leeftijd dan nu worden ingedeeld in verschillende onderwijsniveaus. Het is lastig om de potentiële effectiviteit van zulke beleidsmaatregelen te beoordelen, omdat de invloed van genetische aanleg en van familieachtergrond makkelijk met elkaar verward kunnen worden. Daarom gebruikt dit project tweelingstudies om het samenspel tussen de invloed van genen, familie en scholen op opleiding te bestuderen. 

Sources of Sibling Dissimilarity

Although most of social stratification research focuses on differences between families, the largest share of inequality in society occurs within families. This project investigates how such differences between siblings come about. More specifically, it looks how parents divide their resources among their children (e.g., whether they reinforce or compensate existing differences between children), and how these parental strategies depend on other factors, such as family SES and family size.

Afgeronde onderzoeksprojecten

Sources of Sibling Similarity. Status Attainment in the Netherlands during Modernization (Ph.D Project, 2009–2015)

The aim of the project is to describe and explain temporal and spatial variation in the measured and unmeasured influence of the family on occupational status attainment of their children in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. The family influences the status attainment of their children by transferring resources such as financial, cultural, social and genetic capital. The conventional indicator for family resources—occupational status of the father—will never be able to capture all these resources fully. To get around this problem, so-called sibling models will be used as they allow assessing the total family impact and how much of this total impact measured variables are able to account for. Moreover, we find out to what extent it is necessary to include extended family (e.g., grandfathers, uncles) in the analyses in order to understand the total family impact fully. An important and attractive feature of the project is that hypotheses are tested using long-term historical data such as digitized vital registers.

• Supervisors: Marco H.D. van Leeuwen (UU/IISG), Ineke Maas (UU/VU)
• Financing: ERC Advanced Investigators Grant “Towards Open Societies?”, a project with the aim of studying patterns, processes and determinants of social mobility over the past three centuries.

Coordination and Cooperation Problems in Network Good Production (Master’s Thesis, 2007-2009)

This thesis deals with situations where actors look to form links with others to produce a network good (a particular form of collective good). There are coordination and cooperation problems that hinder the efficient production of a network good. I studied and tested experimentally the conditions under which these problems are more easily solved.

• Supervisor: Vincent Buskens
• An adapted version has been published in Games (see publications).

Research interests

• Social mobility
• Inequality
• Long-term changes in stratification systems
• Gene-environment interplay
• Sibling/twin methods