Analysing Consumer Responses to Food Safety Results of a Survey in the Netherlands

Consumer confidence in food safety appears to be under pressure as a result of several food scandals and food scares in recent years. Regaining the trust of food consumers in food production and food products is talk of the town in both government buildings and agribusiness offices. Instead of talking about consumers, this article is first and foremost about what consumers themselves think and feel about food safety. The foundation of this research is a survey among nearly 1100 Dutch consumers. Investigation focuses on food safety from the consumer's perspective in which food safety is examined comprehensively. This manifests itself in the dependent variables this research takes into consideration. With respect to the independent variables, multivariate analysis shows that both classic, socio-economic variables such as age or income, and modern variables of a socio-cultural origin are relevant in analysing and understanding contemporary food consumers.food safety, consumer concerns, risk perception, attitude, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Allochtonen en overgewicht

Deze publicatie gaat in op de vraag in hoeverre volwassen Turken, Marokkanen, Surinamers en Antillianen kampen met overgewicht, welke verschillen er zijn met de autochtone bevolking en welke factoren hieraan ten grondslag ligge

Evaluation of stakeholder participation in monitoring regional sustainable development

This paper presents a theoretical framework that can be used to discuss the question of how context, time and different participatory process designs influence the results of participatory monitoring projects in terms of concrete outputs (such as sustainability indicators) and the more intangible social outcomes (such as learning and stakeholder relations). We will discuss and compare four different cases of participatory monitoring of provincial sustainable development in the Netherlands. The results show sustainability issues selected by the stakeholders reflect the socio-economic and ecological structural characteristics of their region. In a different context, stakeholders not only assign different weights to the same set of issues, but more importantly they select a completely different set of regional aims altogether. Since these regional structural characteristics only change slowly over time, the influence of time on stakeholder preferences is shown to be only of minor importance. However, the dissipation of learning effects is shown to be a fundamental challenge for the cyclical nature of participatory monitoring, especially when its goal is shared agenda building. Another important conclusion is that, in the design of participatory processes, more attention should be devoted to providing stakeholders with the opportunity to comment on an ‘intermediate’ product

The labour market position of Turkish immigrants in Germany and the Netherlands; reason for migration, naturalisation and language proficiency

On the basis of two datasets, the German Socio-Economic Panel 2002 and the Dutch Social Position and Use of Provision Survey 2002, we investigate the importance of characteristics related to immigration for the labour market position of Turkish immigrants. We use regression techniques to correct for composition effects in employment rates, tenured job rates and job prestige scores (ISEI). First, we find that educational attainment and language proficiency have a higher return in the Netherlands than in Germany. Second, we find that second generation immigrants have improved their labour market position relative to the first generation of labour migrants and their partners. The improvement is largely due to an improvement in educational attainment and language proficiency. Third, for the Netherlands we find a positive relation between naturalisation and labour market position, while for Germany we find a negative relation with tenured employment. The contrasting results on tenured employment may be explained partly by differences in immigration rules. In Germany, economic self-reliance is more important than in the Netherlands, and this may lead to a stronger incentive to naturalise for workers with a temporary contract.

Over de integratie van migranten in Nederland en de actualiteit van het integratieconcept

Professor Jaco Dagevos is benoemd als bijzonder hoogleraar Integratie en Migratie aan de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. De leerstoel is gevestigd bij de afdeling Sociologie van de Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen (FSW) en is ingesteld door het Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP). Jaco Dagevos houdt zich bezig met vraagstukken over integratie en migratie. Zijn wetenschappelijk onderzoek richt zich onder andere op de integratie van migranten van Turkse, Marokkaanse, Surinaamse en Antilliaanse origine. Daarnaast onderzoekt hij de achtergronden van huwelijksmigratie, de oorzaken van arbeidsmigratie vanuit Midden- en Oost-Europa en discriminatie van migranten op de arbeidsmarkt. Resultaten van het onderzoek van de leerstoel moeten bijdragen aan wetenschappelijke en beleidsdiscussies over het verloop en achtergronden van integratie en migratie. Jaco Dagevos (1965) is als hoofd van de sector Onderwijs, Minderheden en Methodologie werkzaam bij het Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Hij studeerde sociologie aan de Erasmus Universiteit waar hij in 1998 ook promoveerde op een studie over de beroepsloopbanen van migranten. Hij is sinds 2000 verbonden aan het SCP, daarvoor werkte hij bij het IVA in Tilburg en het Instituut voor Sociologisch-Economisch Onderzoek van de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam

‘We do things together':exploring a household perspective on early integration processes of recent refugees

People are not isolated, but embedded in ongoing social networks of which the household is a crucial one. Yet, integration trajectories and outcomes are often measured and evaluated on the individual level. To nuance previous research’ preoccupation with a somewhat disconnected individual, we explore a household perspective to better understand early integration trajectories. We depart from the idea that refugees regard their direct families extremely important in early settlement times and employ the notion of embeddedness and the Family Investment Model to guide this investigation. Based on qualitative work among recent Syrian refugees to the Netherlands, we showcase four particular stories that reveal that individual integration trajectories are (also) the product of the households in which these are embedded as individuals exchange integration goals among each other and view integration as a joint venture of all household members. A household perspective succeeds to uncover important mechanisms in integration processes, most notably the fact that the expectations and ambitions that refugees set for themselves and their families is an important driver of individual integration trajectories. We conclude that the integration of individuals needs to be considered more often in the context of households in order to better understand and support them.</p

Consumptie verplicht : een kleine sociologie van consumeren tussen vreten en geweten

Consumptie verplicht biedt een beknopt overzicht van hedendaags sociologisch denken over consumptie, met de nadruk op voedselconsumptie. ‘Consumptie verplicht’ krijgt een drievoudige interpretatie. Ten eerste als een verplicht onderdeel van de sociologie van vandaag. Ten tweede in termen van de karakterisering van steeds méér consumeren als plicht. Ten derde in de betekenis van de samenhang van consumptie met normatieve verplichtingen