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25 maart 2022, Item does not contain fulltext, In recent years, Europe witnessed several terrorist attacks by Islamist terrorists. To date, crucial questions are whether and how such events influence the European public’s resistance towards Muslims, and if such influence depends on the level of intergroup competition, both at the contextual and individual level. Using the European Social Survey (ESS7), we were able to compare respondents interviewed shortly before and after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. While we found no support for a moderating role of intergroup competition, our study shows that the levels of resistance towards Muslim immigrants were higher shortly after the attacks in Ireland and Czech Republic, however, lower in France. For Austria, Finland and Germany we found no influence. Our findings indicate that one cannot be too careful with generalizing conclusions from single countries.

Contains fulltext : 236027.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access), In order to prevent evictions, it is important to gain more insight into factors predicting whether or not tenants receive an eviction order. In this study, ten potential risk factors for evictions were tested. Tenants who were at risk of eviction due to rent arrears in five Dutch cities were interviewed using a structured questionnaire, and six months later their housing associations were asked to provide information about the tenants' current situation. Multiple logistic regression analyses with data on 344 tenants revealed that the amount of rent arrears was a strong predictor for receiving an eviction order. Furthermore, single tenants and tenants who had already been summoned to appear in court were more likely to receive an eviction order. These results can contribute to identifying households at risk of eviction at an early stage, and to develop targeted interventions to prevent evictions.

Item does not contain fulltext, The Constrained Variables Method (CVM) was one of the first and most common approaches in demographic and social research to identify the separate effects of age, time period and birth cohort. The method, which became widely known through an article by Mason and colleagues in 1973, is applied by constraining at least two categories of the age, period and/or cohort variables to be equal. A lively and still ongoing debate has emerged concerning the appropriateness of the CVM to estimate age, period and cohort (APC) models. The most important objection to this method is the potential arbitrariness of the chosen constraint(s), which may lead to biased if not invalid conclusions. As a consequence, APC scholars have turned towards other, often purely statistical, approaches to circumvent the identification problem. But has the CVM rightly been abandoned? In this chapter we describe the essentials of the CVM, give an overview of the main criticisms and pitfalls, and provide some counter-examples and recommendations to overcome these pitfalls. We conclude that the CVM is by no means useless when constraints are made explicit and have a strong theoretical and empirical foundation.

Contains fulltext : 208884.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), Since the 1960s, public support for gender egalitarianism has risen substantially in many western countries. Although earlier research proposed that structural and cultural developments, such as educational expansion, declining religiosity, and the rise of women's employment may explain this upward trend, these theoretical speculations have not yet been thoroughly tested. In the present research, we aim to contribute to the existing literature by empirically analyzing the influence of educational expansion, secularization, and the rise of women's labor force participation on support for gender egalitarianism in the Netherlands and to explore to what extent these influences differ for men and women. We use repeated cross-sectional survey data from the Netherlands involving 12,146 men and 13,858 women. To capture cohort and period effects, we include historical and contemporary contextual measures of educational expansion, secularization, and female labor force participation obtained from population censuses and labor force surveys, covering about 100 birth cohorts and 25 survey years. Of these three indicators, educational expansion contributed most to the rise in men's, and particularly women's, support for gender egalitarianism by changing the normative societal climate in which men and women have grown up and live. Promoting educational levels may therefore have far-reaching benefits for gender equality.

Radboud University, 31 januari 2019, Promotor : Scheepers, P.L.H. Co-promotor : Grotenhuis, H.F. te, Contains fulltext : 200807.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), In the last century, Europe has witnessed mass expansion of educational levels and substantial declines in church membership, church attendance and religious beliefs. These processes have fundamentally reshaped the socio-demographic composition of European societies. This book explores to what extent these societal developments have been accompanied by changes in public opinions. In four empirical chapters, trends in public support for ethnic prejudice, gender egalitarianism and authoritarian values (in short: cultural conservatism) in the Netherlands and in other European countries are explored, based on representative surveys. In addition, different explanations for the relationship between educational expansion, secularisation, and changes in these public opinions are tested. The results show that public support for cultural conservatism has developed in different directions. Educational expansion and secularisation have to a certain extent contributed to these trends, although the ‘liberalising’ influence of these developments is not as clear-cut as is often expected. This book contributes to the understanding of long term changes in cultural conservatism and puts contemporary societal debates about issues of cultural freedom into a wider perspective.

Contains fulltext : 190424.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access), In this contribution, we investigate the extent to which the recent financial crisis has affected levels of political participation in general and more particularly within privileged and underprivileged societal groups in the Netherlands. We derive competing and complementary theoretical propositions about the possible effects of the economic downturn on conventional and unconventional modes of political participation. Economic decline might mobilize people to voice their concerns in the political arena, especially via unconventional modes of political participation such as demonstrating. As privileged societal groups are more likely to participate in politics, economic decline may widen the initial differences between privileged and underprivileged societal groups in their level of political participation. We use the Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies collected before (2002–2006), at the onset of the Eurocrisis (2006-2010) and after prolonged periods of recession (2008-2012) to empirically assess these competing claims. Our results show a slight decrease in conventional modes of- political participation and a slight increase in unconventional modes of political participation during the recent financial and economic crisis. We do not find that the relationship between the economic crisis and political participation changes significantly differently for privileged and underprivileged groups in the Netherlands.

Contains fulltext : 194035.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), We aim to clarify a puzzling paradox: while shares of highly educated and non-religious individuals - who generally hold less prejudice - have increased in the Netherlands, levels of prejudice against ethnic minorities have yet risen over time. To solve the paradox, we use cross-sectional data from 1985 to 2011 in counterfactual analyses. In these analyses we simulate that levels of ethnic prejudice within categories of education, church membership, and church attendance are kept constant at the 1985 level and a new simulated trend in prejudice is estimated for the 1985-2011 period. Our findings show that changing levels of prejudice within categories of education are partly responsible for the trend. We conclude that the increasing share of highly educated individuals has not resulted in a decline of prejudice in the Netherlands over time, because all Dutch have become more prejudiced over the years and in particular the higher educated.

Contains fulltext : 178425.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access), This study examines the relationship between important social, cultural, economic, and demographic changes and the rise of support for gender egalitarianism within the Dutch population between 1979 and 2012. Cohort replacement, educational expansion, secularization, and the feminization of the labor force are important processes that have taken place in western societies in ways that may have fostered support for gender egalitarianism. Using unique data from 16 repeated cross-sectional surveys in the Netherlands, we estimate age-period-cohort regression models, and the outcomes are subsequently applied in counterfactual simulation designs. Our results show that the social, cultural, economic, and demographic changes explain only a small part of the modest rise in support for gender egalitarianism for men, while they provide a much better explanation of the stronger rise among women. Especially the replacement of older female cohorts by younger ones seems to have propelled support for gender egalitarianism among women throughout the years.

Contains fulltext : 168867.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), Sweeney and Ulveling (1972) introduced weighted effect coding, where the estimates for categories of nominal and ordinal variables are deviations from the arithmetic mean, typically from a sample. This somewhat neglected parameterization is preferred over the well-known effect coding (ANOVA) if the data are unbalanced (i.e., when categories hold different numbers of observations) and was recently revived in this journal (te Grotenhuis et al. 2016). In this paper, we show that weighted effect coding can also be applied to regression models with interaction effects. The weighted effect coded interactions represent the additional effects over and above the main effects obtained from the model without these interactions. This is a useful alternative to effect coding when the data are unbalanced as in most observational data. In this contribution, we describe this novel parameterization and provide syntax, data, and examples in SPSS, R, and Stata on http://www.ru.nl/sociology/mt/wec/downloads. For didactical reasons we apply OLS regression models, but weighted effect coded interactions can be used in any generalized linear model. Throughout this text we use the word 'interaction', while other researchers prefer 'moderation'.

Contains fulltext : 166111.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access) Contains fulltext : supplements.pdf (Author’s version preprint ) (Open Access) Contains fulltext : Rscripts.pdf (Author’s version preprint ) (Open Access), Background: The Friedman rank sum test is a widely-used nonparametric method in computational biology. In addition to examining the overall null hypothesis of no significant difference among any of the rank sums, it is typically of interest to conduct pairwise comparison tests. Current approaches to such tests rely on large-sample approximations, due to the numerical complexity of computing the exact distribution. These approximate methods lead to inaccurate estimates in the tail of the distribution, which is most relevant for p-value calculation. Results: We propose an efficient, combinatorial exact approach for calculating the probability mass distribution of the rank sum difference statistic for pairwise comparison of Friedman rank sums, and compare exact results with recommended asymptotic approximations. Whereas the chi-squared approximation performs inferiorly to exact computation overall, others, particularly the normal, perform well, except for the extreme tail. Hence exact calculation offers an improvement when small p-values occur following multiple testing correction. Exact inference also enhances the identification of significant differences whenever the observed values are close to the approximate critical value. We illustrate the proposed method in the context of biological machine learning, were Friedman rank sum difference tests are commonly used for the comparison of classifiers over multiple datasets. Conclusions: We provide a computationally fast method to determine the exact p-value of the absolute rank sum difference of a pair of Friedman rank sums, making asymptotic tests obsolete. Calculation of exact p-values is easy to implement in statistical software and the implementation in R is provided in one of the Additional files and is also available at http://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/726696/friedmanrsd.zip.

Contains fulltext : 166462.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), To include nominal and ordinal variables as predictors in regression models, their categories first have to be transformed into so-called 'dummy variables'. There are many transformations available, and popular is 'dummy coding' in which the estimates represent deviations from a preselected 'reference category'. A way to avoid choosing a reference category is effect coding, where the resulting estimates are deviations from a grand (unweighted) mean. An alternative for effect coding was given by Sweeney and Ulveling in 1972, which provides estimates representing deviations from the sample mean and is especially useful when the data are unbalanced (i.e., categories holding different numbers of observation). Despite its elegancy, this weighted effect coding has been cited only 35 times in the past 40 years, according to Google Scholar citations (more recent references include Hirschberg and Lye 2001 and Gober and Freeman 2005). Furthermore, it did not become a standard option in statistical packages such as SPSS and R. The aim of this paper is to revive weighted effect coding illustrated by recent research on the body mass index (BMI) and to provide easy-to-use syntax for SPSS, R, and Stata on http://www.ru.nl/sociology/mt/wec/downloads. For didactical reasons we apply OLS regression models, but it will be shown that weighted effect coding can be used in any generalized linear model.

Contains fulltext : 159899.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)

Item does not contain fulltext, Steeds meer docenten plaatsen educatieve instructiefilmpjes op YouTube als voorbereiding op toetsen. Maar zorgt het ook daadwerkelijk voor betere resultaten?

Contains fulltext : 159619.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access), In this article, we discuss a study by Masters et al. (2014), published in Demography. Masters and associates estimated age, period, and cohort (APC) effects on U.S. mortality rates between 1959 and 2009 using the intrinsic estimator (IE). We first argue that before applying the IE, a grounded theoretical justification is needed for its fundamental constraint on minimum variance of the estimates. We next demonstrate IE's high sensitivity to the type of dummy parameterization used to obtain the estimates. Finally, we discuss challenges in the interpretation of APC models. Our comments are not restricted to the article in question but pertain generally to any research that uses the IE.

Contains fulltext : 156085.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), Living examples: the positive effect of instructional videos on physics tests in Dutch pre-university classes. Aim of this study is to measure the effect of instructional videos on physics tests, taken in the highest classes of Dutch pre-university education (vwo 5 and 6) in 2014. The students (aged between 17 and 19) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. In a first trial, the control group used a textbook to prepare for a physics test, while the experimental group watched instructional videos on YouTube. In a second trial, the control group watched the videos and the experimental group used the textbook to prepare for a second physics test. In this research design, both between and within group comparisons of the test results have been made. Each and every comparison indicated a significant and relevant positive effect: if instead of a textbook, videos were used for preparation, the percentage of correct answers improved with 10.5 points [90% CI 7.5 ‐ 13.5] and the average percentile score increased with 24 points [90% CI 17 ‐ 30], with an overall effect size (Cohen's D) of 0.9. This indicates a strong positive influence on tests results when short instructional videos are being used in class.

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Contains fulltext : 150330.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), Trends in ethnocentric reactions among the Dutch population, 1979-2012 Based upon predictions from 1996 about future trends in ethnocentric reactions in the Netherlands, we investigate the trends in ethnocentric reactions among the general public from 1979 to 2012. We distinguish two forms of ethnocentric reactions: negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities and public support for ethnic discrimination. In line with one of the predictions from 1996, we find an increase in negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities. Although this relates to increasing levels of diversity in the Netherlands, this finding may also reflect a decrease in the social norm that prohibits overt negative stances towards ethnic minorities. With regard to public support for ethnic discrimination, we find no clear upward or downward trend since the mid-nineties. Lower educated and older birth cohorts show stronger ethnocentric reactions. Although there are some indications that those with secondary educational levels and the youngest birth cohorts show stronger ethnocentric reactions over time, there are no significant differences in trends across educational levels and birth cohorts. Changes in ethnocentric reactions are rather robust across different social categories.

Contains fulltext : 139799.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access) Contains fulltext : 139799-1.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access), This article explores an important property of the intrinsic estimator that has received no attention in literature: the age, period, and cohort estimates of the intrinsic estimator are not unique but vary with the parameterization and reference categories chosen for these variables. We give a formal proof of the non-uniqueness property for effect coding and dummy variable coding. Using data on female mortality in the United States over the years 1960-1999, we show that the variation in the results obtained for different parameterizations and reference categories is substantial and leads to contradictory conclusions. We conclude that the non-uniqueness property is a new argument for not routinely applying the intrinsic estimator.

Contains fulltext : 145486.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access), Tests of hypotheses explaining the variation in church attendance are dominated by the use of international comparative survey data covering many countries with only a limited number of samples within these countries. As a result, the main research focus is on between country effects and hardly on within country effects. The latter, however, comprises a more convincing test, because fewer assumptions about unobserved country-specific variables are required. Elaborating on various analytical models, we show that results from a between country research design may lead to inaccurate conclusions. To illustrate this point, we selected the Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File, which includes as many European countries on as many points in time as possible. Step by step we disentangle the well-known strong negative overall between country correlation of social security with church attendance. We show that this correlation most likely is owing to unspecified country characteristics, as within countries, social security is sometimes positively related to church attendance and sometimes negatively, whereas on average there is no effect at all. Rather than increases in social security spending, rising gross domestic product seems to reduce church attendance. Our cautionary tale about the use of between country research designs applies to other fields of research as well.

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Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 11 juni 2013, Promotor : Ruben, R. Co-promotor : Grotenhuis, H.F. te, Contains fulltext : 112930.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)