Bart Van de Putte

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Sociology

The majority of Turkish and Moroccan minorities in Western Europe prefer transnational marriages over local co-ethnic and mixed marriages. Recent studies indicate partner selection patterns might be shifting after remaining unchanged for decades. However, it remains unclear to what extent changes observed in earlier studies have continued to carry...

This Festschrift in honour of Koen Matthijs is published on the occasion of his retirement as Full Professor of Sociology and Demography at the Centre for Sociological Research of KU Leuven (Belgium) as per 1 October 2021.

This study examines how European variation in breastfeeding initiation and duration rates is related to the presence of baby-friendly hospitals, the international code of marketing of breast-milk substitutes, and different constellations of maternal, paternal, and parental leave. We use Eurobarometer data (2005) to compare initiation and duration l...

This paper focuses on divorce amongst Turkish and Moroccan Belgians, with a specific focus on the effect of partner-choice patterns. Divorce patterns of marriages established between 01 January 2001 and either 31 December 2003 (descriptive part), or 31 December 2005 (event-history analyses) are analysed and compared to marriages established between...

The ethnic residential segregation literature seldom considers household characteristics, despite their importance for residential mobility. This study offers a first step to amend this lacuna by focussing on the relationship between marital status and the presence of children on the one hand and the extent to which ethnic majority households live...

Despite the importance of household characteristics for residential mobility, these characteristics are seldom considered in research on ethnic residential segregation. This study seeks to fill this gap when focusing on the residential behaviour of ethnic minorities and the constraints they face on the housing market. We use conditional logit model...

This paper provides insight into remarriages amongst Turkish and Moroccan Belgians. Although the issue of remarriage is of particular relevance, given the rising divorce rates that have been observed amongst these groups in recent decades, it remains largely understudied. We examine remarriage rates and patterns of partner choice in second marriage...

Although research suggests that higher education leads to higher levels of ethnic inter-marriage, there is little research that describes and explains the variability of partner choice options for highly educated ethnic minority women. Using data from semi-structured interviews with thirty highly educated second-generation Turkish Belgian women, th...

This article describes an unprecedented decline in transnational partnerships among Turkish migrants in Flanders, using population data on all marriages between 2001 and 2008. Studying parental preferences regarding partner selection, we examine attitudinal mechanisms behind this decline. Based on a representative survey, our first result is that (...

Verschillende gemeentes in België streven ernaar jonge, middenklasse gezinnen aan te trekken. Dit kan echter leiden tot gentrificatie en de verdringing van de oorspronkelijke inwoners. Om verdringing tegen te gaan, is het nodig te weten waar gentrificatie plaatsvindt. Van Criekingen (2008, 2009) ontwikkelde methodes om gentrificatie in kaart te bre...

This study explores how different forms of ethnic-specific networks and ties influence realized educational mobility-and subsequently occupational mobility-among a group of highly educated Turkish Belgian women. Analysis of interview data with thirty highly-educated Turkish Belgian women focuses on their experiences of how various forms of ethnic-s...

Previous research on gentrification almost exclusively focussed on either the gentrifiers or those who are displaced. Those who manage to avoid displacement remain understudied. To shed new light on these original inhabitants, we link upward change in low-income neighbourhoods, measured by the changing socio-economic composition of the neighbourhoo...

While research has focused on a number of dimensions of work–family conflict (WFC), hardly any literature exists that analyses how differences in family systems might help to explain variations in WFC experiences. By employing Reher’s typology of strong and weak family ties to integrate existing research and identify unaddressed features, this stud...

An “East–West” divide in contraceptive use patterns has been identified across Europe, with Western European countries characterized by the widespread use of modern contraception, and Central and Eastern European countries characterized by a high prevalence of withdrawal, the rhythm method, or abortion. Building on the Ready–Willing–Able framework,...

While the construction of high-rise buildings is a popular policy strategy for accommodating population growth in cities, there is still much debate about the health consequences of living in high flats. This study examines the relationship between living in high-rise buildings and self-rated health in Belgium. We use data from the Belgian Census o...

Even though breastfeeding is typically considered the preferred feeding method for infants worldwide, in Belgium, breastfeeding rates remain low across native and migrant groups while the underlying determinants are unclear. Furthermore, research examining contextual effects, especially regarding gender (in)equality and ideology, has not been condu...

In this paper, we focus on insecurity perceptions in conflict-affected areas. We apply sociological theories on the determinants of perceived security risks and test hypotheses concerning theories on social and physical vulnerability, social disorder and social integration in the area where the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has operated. We use data...

Public concerns over the possible effects of school segregation on immigrant and ethnic majority religiosity have been on the rise over the last few years. In this paper we focus on (1) the association between ethnic school composition and religious salience, (2) intergenerational differences in religious salience and (3) the role of ethnic school...

Due to the disproportionate attention paid to middle class preferences for urban revival, many scientists and grassroots organizations start from the implicit assumption that lower SES inhabitants of reviving neighbourhoods are opposed to the changes their neighbourhoods undergo. However, what scant research there is on this topic supports the oppo...

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 presenc...

Background: According to the social model of disability, physical 'impairments' become disabilities through exclusion in social relations. An obvious form of social exclusion might be discrimination, for instance on the rental housing market. Although discrimination has detrimental health effects, very few studies have examined discrimination of p...

Partner choice and marriage are used as indicators of paths of acculturation and social inclusion among migrants who moved as singles to Antwerp. Whereas scholars previously studied either the timing and intensity of marriage among migrants or the degree to which migrants married natives, we utilise a model which combines both approaches, linking f...

This article studies class attainment and mobility in a long-term perspective, covering the entire transition from a preindustrial to a mature industrial society. Using longitudinal individual-level data for men in a community of southern Sweden we test different hypotheses linking changing social mobility and status attainment to the industrializa...

Processes of social inclusion and exclusion among internal migrants in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Stockholm in the period 1850-1930 are studied with the help of data on partner choice and marriage of migrants who moved to these cities as singles. In practice, four outcomes related to meeting and mating are linked in our conceptual model to four accultu...

This study investigates socio-economic and ethnic inequalities in social capital and their effects on the process of the labour market entry. We use longitudinal data about the transition from school to work of lower- and middle educated young people in Belgium. Social capital is measured with three robust position generator measures. In line with...

Dit artikel heeft als doel de wetenschappelijke kennis over etnische huurdiscriminatie uit te breiden en zo twee hiaten in de literatuur weg te werken. Deze twee hiaten gaan enerzijds over de samenhang tussen de kennis van het Nederlands en kans om gediscrimineerd te worden en anderzijds over de mate waarin residentiële segregatie en discriminatie...

Voor veel huurders is het betalen van de huurwaarborg een zware last om te dragen. Banken hebben daarom in België sinds 2007 de wettelijke verplichting om via een bankwaarborg de huurwaarborg aan hun cliënten voor te schieten. Dit onderzoek ging via praktijktesten bij 549 bankkantoren in Vlaanderen na of banken al dan niet voldoen aan deze wettelij...

This paper aims at achieving a better understanding of rental housing market discrimination against ethnic minorities. There remain substantial lacunae in the scientific knowledge about the association between the concentration of ethnic minorities in the neighbourhood and discrimination, and possible differences in discrimination based on host soc...

Previous studies reported declining disapproval of homosexuality in Europe but have simultaneously identified the decelerating effect of religiosity and the higher disapproval of homosexuality among migrants. In this paper, we address disapproval of homosexuality among first- and second-generation migrants in Europe by assessing (1) period and coho...

In his book Plaatsen van beschaafd vertier (Places of civilised pleasure) Furnée gives a picture of the social life of the well-to-do classes of The Hague in the nineteenth century. A pivotal insight is the crucial importance of social boundaries in understanding social life. This insight, like many other aspects explored in the book, is not only i...

Socio-demographic heterogamy is commonly believed to lead to lower relationship stability due to the presence of cultural differences between partners. This explanation lacks empirical support, as psychology studies have not confirmed the link between heterogamy and cultural differences, whereas sociological studies have been characterized by probl...

Previous research has demonstrated that ethnic communities try to maintain ethnic boundaries through group pressure to conform to premigration cultural patterns, which mainly happens indirectly through social control. So far however, little attention has been given to how group members respond to this indirect ethnic conformity pressure, as well as...

This study builds on the long-standing theoretical interest in the importance of comparative advantages between partners for the division of paid labour in the family. It adopts a couple perspective on women’s relative labour market participation by considering the role of educational heterogamy. Additionally, it takes account of the family life cy...

This paper aims at achieving a better understanding of rental housing market discrimination against ethnic minorities. There remain substantial lacunae in the scientific knowledge about the association between the concentration of ethnic minorities in the neighbourhood and discrimination, and possible differences in discrimination based on host soc...

In his book Plaatsen van beschaafd vertier (Places of civilised pleasure) Furnee gives a picture of the social life of the well-to-do classes of The Hague in the nineteenth century. A pivotal insight is the crucial importance of social boundaries in understanding social life. This insight, like many other aspects explored in the book, is not only i...

Insecurity theory states that religiosity is predominantly affected by insecurities experienced during childhood, instead of present insecurities. The empirical research of these aspects, however, has been hampered by the difficulty to disentangle past and present contextual effects. In this respect, first-generation migrants offer an interesting c...

This article reports a decline in transnational marriages among Turkish Belgians between 2001 and 2008 and explains the changing trends through a qualitative study of Turkish Belgians’ current partner preferences and union formation practices. Young people prefer a local marriage because it enables upward social mobility, and the possibility of pre...

While considerable research has shown that coethnic communities exercise pressure on their members to conform to certain normative patterns, there is little research that explains variability within coethnic groups regarding ethnic conformity pressure. Drawing on fieldwork and semistructured interviews with children and grandchildren of Turkish imm...

The position generator is a widely used research tool to measure individual social capital. Although the position generator is said to be reliable, there are only a few broad guidelines to construct the instrument and there is no standard list of occupational items. Furthermore, the reliability of the position generator across different occupationa...

This paper deals with individual and contextual effects on the religiosity of first and second generation migrants in Europe. Determining that little attention has been directed towards intergenerational transmission of religion in processes of integration, we argue for an intergenerational perspective on immigrant religiosity. Social integration t...

‘I am too busy’ is one of the most commonly cited reasons for people not to participate in survey research. Yet, empirical data on the association between ‘busyness’ and survey participation are scarce, due to a lack of data on busyness or time pressure among the non-respondents. This article sets off with an overview of the strategies and types of...

Research on the relation between work-family conflict (WFC) and stress focuses either on domain/role-specific stress (e.g. work stress), which is by definition and, operationalisation attributed to the respective role, or it focuses on ‘general’ stress, which can be a too broad or too general concept to measure stress related to WFC. This study int...

The effect of educational differences between partners on marital quality and stability is commonly analysed using difference, or compound measures. This article considers the theoretical foundations for these approaches and examines an alternative approach, diagonal reference models (DRMs). The three methods are then compared empirically, using da...

Er werd onderzocht in hoeverre migranten erin slaagden om in de snel veranderende Antwerpse samenleving (1846-1920) te huwen. Verondersteld wordt dat huwen een manier was om aan marginalisatie te ontsnappen. Onder marginalisatie verstaan wij dat migranten er langdurig niet in slaagden om intensieve sociale contacten op de plaats van vestiging op te...

: In the literature, several contradicting views can be found concerning rural–urban differences in individual social capital. This study combines a literature review with an empirical examination of the different points of view, applying multilevel modeling techniques on data collected from 2,332 students living across 216 municipalities. In gener...

This study investigates how the socio-economic positions of the parents shape the access to social capital of their children. We examine the influence of three parental socio-economic positions on the access to three job-finding resources from the family among labour market entrants. In addition, we examine how ethnic differences in family social c...

Immigratie en diversiteit zijn vaak het onderwerp van passionele debatten. Maar hoe zit het nu met de sociale positie van de Turken en Marokkanen in de maatschappij? Leven ze eerder naast dan met de Belgen? En welke plaats nemen de ‘nieuwe’ migrantengroepen zoals de Bulgaren, Slowaken en Polen in? Dit boekt schetst een beeld van de levensomstandigh...

This study examines whether there is an association between network social capital and self-rated health after controlling for social support. Moreover, we distinguish between network social capital that emerges from strong ties and weak ties. We used a cross-sectional representative sample of 815 adults from the Belgian population. Social capital...

As both time pressure (e.g., Gershuny 2005) and survey nonresponse (e.g., Curtin et al. 2005) increase in Western societies one can wonder whether the busiest people still have time for survey participation. This article investigates the relationship between busyness claims, indicators of busyness and the decline in survey participation in Flemish...

International research shows that both work–family conflict and time pressure are increasing in Western societies. With these increased pressures, precisely those people who are combining work and family obligations may be missing from survey estimates. This study investigates whether the measurement of work–family conflict (WFC) and time pressure...

In this article we study the evolution of marriage seasonality in relation to economic change, particularly connected to changes in labour supply and work intensity of the kind implied by the ‘industrious revolution’. The focus is on southern Sweden in 1685–1894, which was a period of agricultural transformation and early industrialization, when we...

This article compares divorce risks according to marriage type. The common dichotomy between ethnic homogamous and ethnic heterogamous marriages is further elaborated by differentiating a third marriage type; ethnic homogamous marriages between individuals from an ethnic minority group and a partner from the country of origin. Based on the analysis...

Introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Family History 36(2011)2 "From past patterns of divorce to present: new light on the divorce transition" .

It has been argued in sociology, economics, and evolutionary anthropology that family size limitation enhances the intergenerational upward mobility chances in modernized societies. If parents have a large flock, family resources get diluted and intergenerational mobility is bound to head downwards. Yet, the empirical record supporting this resourc...

Economic modernisation in the 19 th and 20 th century and the (almost) concomitant rise of modern science intensified the debates on the nature and the change of social stratification. Since then, measuring social positions is a central task of almost any researcher who examines the past. Both the theories and data sources that are today used by hi...

Expressions like 'upper and lower classes,' 'social promotion,' 'N.N. is a climber,' 'his social position is very high,' 'they are very near socially,'…and so on, are quite commonly used in conversation, as well as in economic, political, and sociological works. All these expressions indicate that there is something which could be styled 'social sp...

The aim of this article is to discuss if, and how, occupational classification schemes can take contextual differences into account. In order to accomplish this we use the SOCPO (social power) scheme. Our results show that this scheme is applicable on rural contexts as well as urban and industrialised contexts.

In this article we address one of the most prominent questions in historical sociology: did economic modernization in the nineteenth century lead to societal openness? In an attempt to answer the question we examine the chances for lower-class grooms of marrying upwardly in five Belgian cities (Aalst, Leuven, Ghent, Verviers, and Liege). Our findin...

Young adults are feeling the pressure to have a steady relationship. Using data from ‘Young in Ghent’ (N = 735), this study examines whether (1) young adults (18-25 year) with a (cohabiting) partner also have a better mental health, and whether (2) there exist gender differences. Furthermore, (3) the deficit paradigm as a dominant explanation model...

In 1830, the year Belgium became independent, there were four divorces in Belgium. From about 1870 to 1910, there were about one hundred divorces per year, and since 1910, there have been about 1,000. The aim of this research is to investigate the factors that played a role in the increase in the number of divorces in Belgium in the course of the n...

This chapter addresses the role of health-related characteristics as a basis of marriage partner selection in a preindustrial population with a low level of social differentiation and a high level of mortality. We measured health characteristics by the level of infant and child mortality in the family of origin of the marriage partners. We observed...

At the turn of the twentieth century, Ghent became a modern industrial city. The new societal conditions undermined old behavioral patterns. In a process of cultural interaction based on strategies of distinction, disciplining, conformism, and trendsetting, the elite, the middle class, and the lower class adopted a new marriage pattern. Social diff...

This paper examines the partner selection of the lower classes during an urban crisis period in early industrial Belgian cities. It was found that in this period characterized by an economic transition, overpopulation, migration and a low standard of living, social heterogamy was high, whereas social homogamy increased, or was ‘restored’, in the su...

This article examines social heterogamy as an indicator of , by which is meant the extent to which social origin, as defined by the social position of one's parents, is used as the main criterion for selection of a marriage partner. We focus on two topics. The role first of migration and then of occupational identity in this selection of a partner...

The authors introduce a new directly comparative approach to the coding and classification of occupational data for the purposes of social analysis. The lack of an explicit way of translating historical occupational titles into a meaningful class or social scheme, which can also be applied across national boundaries, has hindered studies of both pa...

A class scheme for historical occupational data : the analysis of marital mobility in industrial cities in 19th century Flanders and England The authors introduce a new directly comparative approach to the coding and classification of occupational data for the purposes of social analysis. The lack of an explicit way of translating historical occup...

We consider a Plackett-Dale model to study familial transmittance of longevity. We focus the analysis on associations between mother, father and first child, and therefore we work with family clusters of equal size. We propose a series of tests to perform inferences on the model parameters. The methodology is applied to a demographic database of a...

Due to their effect on maternal testosterone levels, sons are said to have reduced maternal longevity in pre-industrial humans. This analysis, using information from a Flemish agricultural village in the 18th-20th centuries, confirms the presence of a negative effect of sons on maternal longevity. However, the effect is mainly observed for mothers...

In this article, the author uses marriage partner selection as an indicator for the openness of a society1to study the level of intermarriage between migrants and natives (homogamy by geographical origin) in three Flemish cities in the period a1800-1913. The main question is whether societal transformations such as modernization and class formation...

The transmission of longevityor post-reproductive survival from parents tooffspring is investigated using data ondemographic and socio-economic characteristicsof the inhabitants of a small Flemish village(Moerzeke) over a period of three hundredyears. This research confirms the possibleexistence of biological mechanisms intransmitting longevity fro...

Le livre étudie dans une perspective comparative les configurations historiques du travail et de la mobilité sociale. Cette classification des professions permet aux chercheurs de pays différents de communiquer entre eux et de faire des comparaisons internationales à travers les 19e et 20e siècles dans les domaines sociaux, économiques et autres de...

Sinds 1995 verzamelt het Centrum voor Bevolkings- en Gezinsonderzoek heel wat gegevens (op individueel niveau) uit de 19e-eeuwse akten van de burger- lijke stand en de bevolkingsregisters. Die data zijn de empirische basis voor ver- schillende afgewerkte en lopende onderzoeksprojecten over de sociologische en demografische oorzaken, gevolgen en ken...