Mens & Maatschappij - Volume 85, Issue 3, 2010

Recidivism of juvenile homicide offenders .

Serious offences against persons perpetrated by juveniles raise fundamental questions about the background, causes, and prevention of future crime. The current study addresses the potential of future crime of juvenile homicide offenders (JHOs) in The Netherlands who were incarcerated in the period 1992-2007. In contrast to merely descriptive former research on recidivism of this offender group, we provide an explanation for why some of the juveniles relapse into crime, while others do not. To this end, associations are investigated between recidivism behavior and risk factors. Results indicate that male JHOs and JHOs who maintain relationships with delinquents run a greater risk to reoffend.

Does knowledge lead to loaning and loaning to learning? The effect of information about student loans on loaning behaviour and study progress of Dutch students .

In recent years, the Dutch government has encouraged students to take out loans. The assumptions were that spreading knowledge about attractive credit terms would create a positive attitude about loaning, and as a result stimulate loaning, thereby lowering the need for side jobs and improving study progress. An experiment among Dutch students tested these assumptions. Results show that former loaning behaviour influences knowledge and attitudes about loaning, and not the other way around. Furthermore, loaning does not positively influence study progress, but having a side job does. Policy makers appear to have started from the wrong assumptions.

The public acceptance of voluntary childlessness in the Netherlands: .

From 20 to 90 per cent in 30 years .

In this paper, we address two research questions, which we answer with data from 13 waves of the repeated cross-sectional survey Cultural Change in the Netherlands (CCN, 1965-1996). First, we decompose the increasing acceptance of voluntary childlessness in effects of cohort replacement and intra-cohort change. We find that between 1965 and 1980 the change is primarily due to intra-cohort effects, whereas cohort replacement has become more important since 1980. Second, we address the question which social categories constitute the 10 percent of the population who do not accept voluntary childlessness. Church attendance – and not religiosity or religious socialization – turns out to be an important factor. Low levels of income and education also negatively affect the acceptance of voluntary childless.

Assimilation into the literary mainstream? Ethnic boundaries in newspaper reviews of ethnic minority authors in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany .

This article addresses to what extent literary critics in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany have drawn ethnic boundaries in their reviews of ethnic minority writers between 1983 and 2009, and to what extent ethnic boundaries in literary criticism have changed in each country in the course of ethnic minority writers’ careers and across time. By analyzing newspaper reviews, we find that American reviewers less often refer to the ethnic and/or majority background of Mexican American authors than Dutch and German critics refer to the background of Moroccan and Turkish minority writers. But while these relatively strong ethnic boundaries tend to weaken over time in the Netherlands, Turkish German authors encounter particularly strong boundaries in subsequent book publications. In the U.S. the reverse is true: ethnic boundaries tend to weaken after the debut has been reviewed.