Studentenbarometer 2009-2010: nonresponse report

This report focuses on the nonresponse in the Studentbarometer 2009-2010. It describes the differences in the distributions of the realized sample of 7190 students in comparison to the total target population of this survey for several key variables. It also provides users of the data with weights to correct significant deviations in these distributions. Without these correcting weights, the deviations in the proportional distributions would make generalisations of the results found in the Studentenbarometer 2009-2010 to the whole UGent target population problematic

De netwerkpartij als kraakpand

Ongeveer een jaar geleden herdoopte de sp.a zichzelf tot een netwerkpartij. Het nieuwe partijmodel was het antwoord op zowel de verkiezingsnederlaag van 10 juni 2007 als de tanende invloed van de klassieke massapartij. Deze netwerkpartij doet echter sterk denken aan het sociologische concept ‘sociaal kapitaal’. Een sociologische analyse van de sterktes en zwaktes, de mogelijkheden en bedreigingen van de netwerkpartij als organisatiemodel dringt zich bijgevolg op

Social support as a form of social capital in status attainment research. An explorative study.

In this study we examine both theoretically and empirically whether social support can be considered as a form of social capital. Theoretically, the social support concept satisfies the conditions of the social capital conceptualisation and the main objections do not stand fire after a critical inquiry. Empirically, two well-established social capital propositions are tested with social support conceptualized as a form of social capital, using data about the attained holiday job of first year university student. For this purpose, a specific application of the resource generator with job search support items has been designed. The results confirm both the social resource proposition and the strength of ties proposition. The perceived availability of job search support seems to have a positive effect on the income and the quality of the attained holiday job. Especially instrumental job search support appears to be useful with respect to the income. In addition, it appears that job search support from the immediate and extended family (strong ties) is more effective that the support from friends (middle ties) and acquaintances (weak ties)

Who flees? An integration of household characteristics in the white flight hypothesis

Although there is an extensive field dedicated to the study of ethnic residential segregation, few scholars investigate the importance of household characteristics for understanding this segregation. Considering the White Flight hypothesis as a special case of the Residential Stress theory, we investigate whether there is a link between the presence of four different house hold types ethnic concentration and segregation. We therefore perform two analyses using the 2001 Census of Belgium: a binary logistic multilevel analysis investigating the chance that a neighbourhood is ethnically concentrated (i.e. has a location quotient higher than 1) and a single level linear regression analysis investigating the dissimilarity score of a city. We find that neighbourhoods with a large share ethnic majority single households and lone parents have a higher chance to be concentrated than neighbourhoods with a lower share of either household type. The same can be said for the percentage cohabitating, childless couples before adding control variables. The percentage families with young children has an inverse relation with neighbourhood concentration before adding control variables. Cities with a higher share families with young children are more segregated than cities with a lower share families with young children. Cities with a high share single households and lone parents, on the other hand, are less segregated than cities with a low share single households or lone parents. We thus conclude that it is important to consider household characteristics when studying White Flight specifically and ethnic residential segregation more general

Different networks, different resources? The ethnic inequality in the access to social capital in Belgium

This study explores whether ethnic differences in formal and informal networks also result in differences in social capital resources. The study fits into a broader research project that focuses on the role of individual social capital in explaining ethnic inequalities in labour market outcomes. Following the social capital theory, ethnic differences in labour market outcomes can be explained to some extent by differences in the access to and the mobilization of social capital. In previous research, the ethnic inequality in the access to social capital has been measured by social network measures, like the ethnic composition of the social contacts and the active membership of voluntary organizations. However, these social network measures are just proxies for the access to social capital, because there are not directly measuring the resources embedded in the social networks. Moreover, these studies state that ethnic bridging ties are better than ethnic bonding ties, because there are bridging into a network rich of resources. This is, however, not yet explicitly tested. Therefore, the aims of this study are to examine whether (1) there is ethnic inequality in the access to social capital and (2) the widely used social network measures (e.g. ethnic composition of the friendship network and membership of voluntary associations) assess adequately social capital resources. For these purposes, we use the position generator methodology. The position generator asks whether the respondent “knows” anyone having an occupation from a systematic list of 10-30 different occupations. Subsequently, different social capital measures can be calculated (e.g. volume of social capital and the composition of social capital). For this study, we use the first wave of the first cohort of the ASK-dataset. This data contains information about 1296 last-year vocational high school students in two multi-ethnic cities in Belgium. Belgium is an interesting case because of its high socio-economic ethno-stratification, and its old and new waves of labour migrants. The population of last-year high school students is chosen for two reasons. First, data collection in high schools is an efficient way to get representative data about this young age category. Second, measuring the access to social capital before the labour market entrance is the best moment in the life course to assess the social inequality, because having a job is also a source of social capital. The results show that the ethnic minorities have a lower volume of social capital and have less access to high and middle class social capital than the male natives. This ethnic inequality in social capital can be explained by the socio-economic inequality. Moreover, it appears that there are clear gender differences in the access to social capital among the natives. With respect to the social network measures, the results show that (1) ethnic bridging friendship ties are bridging into resource rich networks among the male ethnic minorities, but not among the female ethnic minorities, and (2) active membership in voluntary organizations is increasing the access to social capital for female ethnic minorities, but not for male ethnic minorities