Sociology colloquia at the
This series contains
presentations that are of general interest for sociologists To make meetings open for
foreign guests and students, presentations are given in English.
Invitations are also send by email. If you wish to be included in
the mailing list, please contact René Veenstra. Date &
Place Speaker(s) Topic January 25 Daniel Alexandrov Higher School of Economics – St. Petersburg School Differentiation, Networks, and Anti-School Attitudes January 26 Frans Stokman University of Groningen The Crucial Role of Cooperation and Competition in Social Networks for Science and Technology Indicators February 16 Clara Mulder University of Groningen Local Ties and Family Migration March 5 Wendy Manning Bowling Green State University Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution March 15 Gwen van Eijk Leiden University Bridges and Brokers of Social Capital and Network Inequality April 26 Menno Rol University of Groningen Warranting the Use of Causal Claims: A Non-Trivial Case for Interdisciplinarity May 10 Tim Huijts Utrecht University The National Context of Health and Well-Being June 14 Brent Simpson University of South Carolina Altruism and Homophily in Social Relations Tues July 3 William J. Burk Radboud University Nijmegen Selection and Socialization of Alcohol Use, Delinquency, and Depressive Symptoms across Adolescence
September 6 Pierre-Alex Balland Utrecht University To be announced October 18 Jaap Denissen Tilburg University To be announced November 15 Anne Gauthier NIDI To be announced December 6 Ellen Verbakel Radboud University Nijmegen Gay Male and Lesbian Couples in the Netherlands
and represent
various streams of research at our department (and beyond).
Standard time and location: 13:00-14:15, room 128 (“DB-kamer”), Grote Rozenstraat 31 (Bouman-building).
Institution
The colloquia in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.
Longitudinal data analysis workshop by Todd D. Little – May 10-12, 2010 Evolution and human development by Patricia Hawley – May 10-11, 2010 December 6, 2012, 15:30-16:45:
Ellen Verbakel (Radboud University Nijmegen): Gay Male and Lesbian Couples in the Netherlands: Are They Different from Heterosexual Couples?
The family is a widely studied field in sociology and has focused on many topics concerning partnered lives. I will extend theoretical ideas that are usually applied to heterosexual couples to couples with two men or two women. For this colloquium, I will combine the results from several papers I wrote on gay men and lesbians. The first question to be discussed relates to the formation of partnerships: To what extent do assortative mating patterns differ between gay male, lesbian, and heterosexual couples? Once partners have formed a couple, the next question I will answer is: How do same-sex couples divide paid labour compared to heterosexual couples? Finally, I focus on individual labour market careers by answering the question: To what extent are gay men and lesbians better or worse off in terms of occupational success compared to their heterosexual counterparts? Hypotheses have been tested with the Dutch Labour Force Surveys; the results will be discussed.
Ellen Verbakel is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Radboud University Nijmegen. Previously, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Tilburg University. Her research interests include partner choice, partner effects, and relationships.
July 3, 2012, 15:30-16:45:
William J. Burk (Radboud University Nijmegen): Selection and Socialization of Alcohol Use, Delinquency, and Depressive Symptoms across Adolescence
It is generally acknowledged that adolescents select friends with similar problem behaviors, and that adolescent become more similar to their friends’ problems over time. Less is known about when selection and socialization emerge, when these mechanisms peak, and when (or if) these mechanisms dissipate. This study provides a more complete account of the development of selection and socialization of three problem behaviors (alcohol intoxication, delinquency, and depressive symptoms) using a cross-sequential design of three age cohorts: early, middle, and late adolescents. Results generally suggest selection and socialization of externalizing behaviors were more robust than for depressive symptoms and that peer socialization was most robust during middle adolescence than in early or late adolescence. Findings are discussed in terms of various developmental models emphasizing the importance of peers on adolescent psychosocial functioning.
William Burk is an assistant professor of Developmental Psychology in the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University Nijmegen. He received his PhD at Florida Atlantic University (USA), and post-doctoral training at the Center of Developmental Research at Örebro University (Sweden). His research broadly concerns the impact of parental and peer relationships on psychosocial adjustment of children and adolescents.
June 14, 2012, 12:30-14:00
Brent Simpson (University of South Carolina): Altruism and Homophily in Social Relations: Green Beard Selection or Dispositional Colorblindness?
The altruist detection hypothesis holds that altruists have “green beards,” identifiable tell-tale signs of disposition, which they use to find and selectively sort with each other. While previous work supports the hypothesis that people can intuit tell-tale signs of altruism in strangers, we do not know whether detection abilities affect social relations. Building on the theory of reciprocal altruism, we explain why we should not expect altruism homophily. Additionally, we address competing predictions from the altruist detection hypothesis and our own dispositional colorblindness hypothesis about the extent to which people know whether their friends are altruistic. Across three studies employing diverse methodologies and measures, we find virtually no altruism homophily. Moreover, we find that people are poor predictors of their friends’ altruism and prosociality. These findings challenge the altruist detection hypothesis and suggest that human altruism must emerge through other means.
Brent Simpson is professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. He received his PhD in Sociology at Cornell University in 2001. His primary interests include altruism, cooperation, and other forms of prosocial behavior. His talk on power and perception in social networks has no relevance to any of these interests.
May 10, 2012, 13:00-14:15:
Tim Huijts (Utrecht University): The National Context of Health and Well-Being: A Specification of Mechanisms, Contexts, and Outcomes
Social inequalities in health and well-being have been examined extensively in social epidemiology and medical sociology. During the last few years, it has been acknowledged that the national context affects health and well-being in addition to characteristics of the individual (e.g., SES and age) and the proximate social context (e.g., partners, parents, peers, and neighborhoods). Moreover, the strength of social inequalities in health and well-being depends strongly on national characteristics (e.g., health policy). This implies that micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors interact in affecting health and well-being, and that strategies to reduce social inequalities in health and well-being need to address all of these levels jointly. In this presentation, I present a theoretical framework outlining how the health and well-being of individuals is shaped by the interplay between individual and contextual characteristics. Additionally, I discuss the main limitations of existing work in this field: theoretical mechanisms linking the national context to health and well-being are often not clearly articulated, and national characteristics as well as health outcomes are often measured by unspecific typology measures (e.g., welfare regimes) or summary indicators (e.g., self-rated health). As a result of these limitations, scientific and policy implications of existing studies in this field are often limited. Five examples of recent published and unpublished work are used to demonstrate the possibilities and restrictions for making improvements in this line of research: (1) the interplay between individual and national social networks and health, (2) the role of economic conditions in socioeconomic inequalities in health, (3) health systems and inequalities in mortality amenable to health care, (4) gender equity and the gender gap in depression, and (5) policy, economic development, and health damaging behaviour. Methodologically, I discuss the possibilities and limitations of using several multilevel regression methods in this type of research.
Tim Huijts is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utrecht University / ICS. In April 2011 he defended his PhD thesis (cum laude) on social ties and health in a cross-national perspective at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His research interests include health inequalities, multilevel analysis, health damaging behaviour, health and family policy, and societal openness and mobility. He published in international journals such as the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, European Journal of Public Health, European Sociological Review, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science & Medicine, and Sociology of Health and Illness.
March 15, 2012, 13:00-14:15:
Gwen van Eijk (Leiden University): Bridges and Brokers of Social Capital and Network Inequality
Researchers of social capital debate about what kinds of ties provide access to resources (the ties that we can label as social capital): how to identify the most useful and effective ties? This question leads back to distinctions between bonding and bridging (Putnam) and between strong and weak (Granovetter). According to these conceptualizations, bridging and weak ties are more useful for, and effective in, accessing resources. However, this dichotomy makes less sense considering that (especially nowadays) many personal networks consist of (partly) separated clusters, organized around work, leisure, family and other activities. Furthermore, data from an intensive survey on personal networks and social capital (n=195) shows that both strong and weak ties provide access to resources. Building on Burt’s concept of ‘brokerage’, I explain how bonding and strong ties can also function as ‘brokers’ (providing access to resources). Brokers may be sociable or setting-specific ties and this matters for how resources are (likely) exchanged: either through relationship closeness or through setting-embeddedness. This alternative conceptualization of access to resources is valuable because it helps understand network inequality. In this presentation I look into class inequality of potential social capital.
Gwen van Eijk is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Leiden University. She obtained her PhD (cum laude) in 2010 at the Delft University of Technology. Her thesis is an intensive mixed-methods study on the relation between neighbourhood composition and network inequality (published as Unequal networks. Spatial segregation, relationships and inequality in the city, IOS Press, 2010).
March 5, 2012, 14:00-15:15:
Wendy Manning (Bowling Green State University, USA): Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution: An Examination of Recent Marriages
An ongoing question remains for American family researchers: Why does a positive association between cohabitation and marital dissolution exist when one of the primary reasons to cohabit is to test relationship compatibility? Drawing on recently collected data from the 2006 – 2008 National Survey of Family Growth, we examined whether premarital cohabitation experiences were associated with marital instability among a recent contemporary (married since 1996) marriage cohort of men (n = 1,483) and women (n = 2,003). We found that a dichotomous indicator of premarital cohabitation was in fact not associated with marital instability among women and men. These findings are consistent with a diffusion perspective. Furthermore, among cohabitors, marital commitment prior to cohabitation (engagement or definite plans for marriage) is tied to lower hazards of marital instability among women, but not men. This research contributes to our understanding of cohabitation, marital instability, and broader family change.
Wendy Manning is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bowling Green State University. She is the Co-Director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research and Director of the Center for Family Demographic Research. She is a family demographer with a research emphasis on union formation and stability and relationships among adolescents as well as adults. She is the co-principal investigator on NIH funded grant, Counting Families: Household Matrices with Multiple Family Members, as well as funded projects on young adult and teen dating relationships and the meaning of cohabiting unions in the U.S. She has served as the President of the Association of Population Centers, Vice-President of the Population Association of America, and the Chair of the American Sociological Association Population Section.
February 16, 2012, 13:00-14:15:
Clara H. Mulder (University of Groningen): Local Ties and Family Migration
The migration of couples and families has thus far been mainly approached from human-capital and gender perspectives. In this paper, we investigate the role of the male and female partner’s local ties in the likelihood of family migration. Our hypotheses are that local ties to work and family strongly decrease the likelihood of migrating; that given the dominating gender structures ties to the man’s work are more influential than ties to the woman’s work; and that ties to the woman’s family are more influential than ties to the man’s family. We use data from the unique ASTRID micro database for Sweden, based on administrative information about the entire Swedish population. The method is logistic regression analysis of moving a distance exceeding 50 kilometers, for two-gender couples who did not separate between December 2004 and December 2005. We find marked negative associations of working close to home, the presence of parents and siblings nearby, and whether someone lives near the place of birth, with the likelihood of migrating. The man’s ties to work seem to be more important to the likelihood of migrating than the woman’s, but we find hardly any gender differences in the impact of ties to family.
Clara H. Mulder is professor of Demography at the Department of Geography of the University of Groningen and head of the Population Research Centre at the same university. Her research interests include households and housing, leaving the parental home, household formation and dissolution, home-ownership, residential mobility and family relations.
January 26, 2012, 13:00-14:15:
Frans Stokman (University of Groningen): The Crucial Role of Cooperation and Competition in Social Networks for ,Science and Technology Indicators
Scientific publications are typically and increasingly ‘outcomes of joint production, activities that involve heterogeneous but complementary resources, task and outcome interdependencies, where the participants recognize a joint value creating endeavor, and see themselves as part of this endeavor’ (Lindenberg and Foss 2011). Increasingly, such activities involve cooperation across universities, some even at a worldwide scale. They inevitably involve both shared and conflicting interests. Shared interests result from the added value of the joint product (e.g. a large dataset at an international or worldwide level); conflicting interests from the division of the added value (e.g. which groups are allowed to use which parts of the data at what moment) and the size of the individual contributions to the joint production (e.g. which group is coordinating the data gathering). Other lines of cooperation and competition may emerge around the question which groups are able to derive the most interesting insights from these data.
The perceptions of the relative importance of shared versus conflicting interests strongly determines whether cooperation or competition dominates in social relationships. For scientific progress it is important to promote both. Typically these lines of cooperation and competition are flexible, dynamic, and vary over different fields of study.
Impact factors aim to measure prominence. They typically result in rankings of journals, individual scientists, and universities (or departments and disciplines within universities). Prominence typically represents competition, but as these impact factors do not reveal the units of cooperation across scientists and universities, their value for policies is very moderate and may even lead to wrong policies, particularly among managers who like to define their policies on simple indicators and believe in the value of these indicators for the generation of prominence. The keynote contains suggestions how to promote joint production and, as a side product of that, prominence.
Frans Stokman is a Professor of Social Science Research Methodology at the University of Groningen. He is the author of many books and articles and his research interests include social network analysis, political analysis, decision making and the exertion of power. See also: his website.
January 25, 2012, 12:30-14:00 (M.0055):
Daniel Alexandrov (Higher School of Economics – St. Petersburg): School Differentiation, Networks, and Anti-School Attitudes
In the talk we will present some preliminary results of our large ongoing project on ethnicity, segregation and social networks in Russian schools. The presentation will cover institutional context (school structure etc.), the effects of socio-economic and ethnic segregation in Russian urban educational system, and the analysis of school network data from our school survey in St. Petersburg (104 schools, 419 classes, 7300 students). One of our main research foci is on school integration of minority students and the role of motivation and pro-school attitudes in school achievement. Researchers have argued that racial/ethnic /class gaps in educational achievement are often due to peer pressure effects and the emergence of particular ‘anti-school culture’ of working class and/or minority students in schools. Much of previous research on differentiation-polarization was focused on individual and school level, while we look at the emergence and persistence of anti-school culture in students' small crowds (cliques) rather than on school level. We identify cliques in class networks and use them as a level of analysis anti-school attitudes along with individual and schools. We will conclude by discussing future research questions: dynamic analysis of anti-school clique formation and polarization in school networks and modeling between-school ethnic segregation through school choice.
Daniel Alexandrov is a Professor at the State University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia. This presentation is a co-production with Valieria Ivaniushina.