Mens & Maatschappij - Volume 84, Issue 3, 2009

The role of European welfare states in intergenerational monetary transfers: A micro-level perspective .

This article integrates sociological and economical theory to provide a comprehensive explanation for why parents send money to particular children, and tests more explicit hypotheses on how differences in welfare state provisions can explain divergent patterns between countries. The spending on various welfare domains as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is used to determine whether intergenerational solidarity is shaped by welfare state provisions. We use data from the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to analyse the influence of welfare state provisions on the likelihood of intergenerational transfers in ten European countries. The results indicate that parental resources and reciprocity expectations as well as children’s needs are important determinants of monetary transfers. Although differences between countries are found, they do not seem to justify the distinct division between “the three worlds of welfare” often used in sociological work.

To choose and to loose: An analysis of educational choices after receiving a B-certificate in Flemish secondary education as a replication of Kloosterman and De Graaf (2009) .

This study replicates the main findings of a recent Dutch study of Kloosterman and De Graaf (2009) using data from Flanders. We examine the educational choices made after receiving a ‘B-certificate’. This certificate is given to pupils who fail the year in a particular educational track; it forces them to choose between repeating the year, or, going on to the next year in a different educational track. By studying these non-collective moments of choice, we find that students with a weaker social background have more than a double disadvantage compared to their more fortunate peers. First, due to their generally weaker scholastic performance, the receipt of the B-certificate forces them to make educational choices more often. Second, they tend to make less ambitious choices that limit their future educational career. The study concludes with some generalizations.

The co-evolution of friendship relations and delinquent behaviour among Dutch adolescents .

This article focuses on two research questions. To what degree is similarity in delinquent behaviour among Dutch secondary school students explained by selection and influence processes? And to what extent is the effect of friends’ delinquency on adolescents’ delinquency level moderated by characteristics of the friendship relation? Hypotheses were drawn from Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory, its extension by Burgess and Akers, and Hirschi’s Social Control Theory. The hypotheses were tested with longitudinal social network data, using the recently developed software program ‘Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis’ (SIENA). The network data were gathered among lower educated students of twelve secondary schools in the Dutch province of South Holland during a three-year period. The analyses suggest that adolescents tend to adjust their behaviour to the delinquency level of their peers (influence process), and tend to be friends with others who have a similar level of delinquency (selection process). Further, the results indicate that attachment to friends, time spent with friends and social pressure of friends do not affect the influence of peers on adolescents’ delinquency level.

In this paper, the relation between job characteristics and health is examined. The main aim is to investigate what role different dimensions of jobs play in explaining employees‘ health, deriving hypotheses from medical sociology and the organizational psychological literature. The dataset used to test the hypotheses is the Time Competition Survey (2003, N = 894), a large scale survey conducted among employees and managers in 30 Dutch organizations. Ordinal logistic regression methods are used to analyze these data. The results indicate that job demands have a stronger effect on employees‘ health than income, job control and job challenge.