Mens & Maatschappij - Volume 89, Issue 3, 2014

In the Netherlands, bilingual tracks in higher secondary education (TTO) are growing. Based on the literature on primary and secondary effects of social background and given the presumed advantages of these bilingual tracks, we expected that children from higher social backgrounds more often choose TTO than children from lower social backgrounds. Results based on data from 498 first and second grade pupils in six schools who offer both TTO and regular pre-university education confirmed this expectation. Parental cultural and social resources could not explain the relationship between social background and the choice for TTO. Children with parents who more use English at home or who are more involved in school do not follow TTO more often. Parental reading behaviour is however related to the choice for TTO: children from higher social backgrounds whose parents read a lot in Dutch more often follow TTO, whereas children from lower social backgrounds whose parents read a lot in Dutch more often follow regular pre-university education.

Although prior research showed that poverty is related to less optimal child outcomes, how the duration of poverty and parental psychological resilience affect the parenting quality is less well understood. To help fill this gap, we used data from a survey of mothers on social assistance in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. In this study two groups of mothers were distinguished: those who were on social assistance for over five years and those less than a year. We tested two hypotheses: 1) long-term poor mothers show more negative forms of parenting than mothers who are only recently on social assistance, 2) mothers with limited psychological capital show more negative forms of parenting. Female research assistants interviewed 111 mothers at home and mothers filled in questionnaires on parenting and psychological resilience (coping style, mastery and self-esteem). Contrary to expectation, poverty duration appeared not to affect quality of parenting. Maternal psychological capital or resilience – was related to parenting, but only with positive forms of parenting (support and positive control) and not with negative parenting (negative control). Negative parenting was more related to the ethnic background of mothers. A practical implication of our study is to offer parents on social assistance support to strengthen their psychological resilience.

Dutch municipal authorities have a statutory duty to offer people who apply for support (by way of the Social Support Act) a choice between receiving support in kind or in the form of a personal budget, but are free to set their own policy regarding who is offered a personal budget and how attractive the personal budget option is. This policy freedom may manifest itself in how actively local authorities inform applicants about the possibility of a personal budget, the level of personal budget rates and the support local authorities offer in administering the personal budget.

Earlier research has focused mainly on the characteristics of personal budget-holders (the micro-level). The present study not only considers the impact of those individual characteristics, but also investigates what impact differences in the policy on personal budgets between local authorities (the meso-level) has on how well informed people are about personal budgets and on the extent to which this form of support is chosen. In a structured verbal interview, we interviewed 1,026 applicants who had been ruled eligible for domestic help. Choosing a personal budget was an option for these applicants. The applicants lived in 70 municipalities for which we also had policy data, and we were therefore able to relate the data across the municipalities. Since we used a clustered sample (first selecting municipalities and then applicants within them), multilevel analyses were performed.

Older persons and people with a sudden onset disability were less often informed about the possibility of a personal budget than younger people and people with a gradually deteriorating disability. Higher educated people were more often informed than low-educated people. Other characteristics at individual and policy level had no influence on the extent to which people were informed about the personal budget. The degree to which people opt for a personal budget is explained mainly by the degree to which applicants were informed about this possibility. The inequality in choosing a personal budget between municipalities could be reduced relatively simply, by ensuring that people are properly informed.

In this study, gender differences in adolescent problem behaviour and its possible causes on the individual and contextual level are analysed. The focus lies on differences between boys and girls in the influence of personality, family and national cultural context characteristics. Insights from different theoretical traditions are combined. We use information on 18,027 adolescents from 24 European countries from the 2010 EU Kids Online Survey to estimate multivariate multilevel models on important determinants of problem behaviour and their gender specific influence. Consistent with previous research, we find that adolescent boys show more problem behaviour than adolescent girls. Personality traits, such as self-control, largely explain this gender gap. Low self-control affects girls more strongly than boys. Both adolescent boys and girls in single parent households are more likely to participate in problem behaviour. Boys are more likely to use problem behaviour to cope with a low socioeconomic parental status than girls. Lastly, we found that the gender gap in problem behaviour differs between countries, and is partly explained by the level of gender inequality in a country. Cultural gender norms hinder problem behaviour among adolescent girls, whereas boys show more problem behaviour in these countries.