Peer Scheepers

Radboud University | RU · Department of Sociology

Van oktober 2021 tot en met februari 2022 is er kwalitatief onderzoek verricht onder vrijwilligers die vrijwilligerswerk voor vluchtelingen deden in Nederland. Deze vrijwilligers waren werkzaam op locaties in en rondom Nijmegen. Dit betroffen AZC’s, locaties waar vluchtelingenorganisaties werkzaam waren en een noodopvang waar Afghaanse vluchtelinge...

The goal of collecting the Volunteering for Refugees data is to provide a database to answer questions that concern several aspects of volunteering for refugees. Combining open-ended and close-ended questions that are inspired on influential (volunteering) literature, the data elaborate, amongst others, on the relationship between the involved orga...

This study’s objective is to test one of the key theoretical orientations in the literature on intergroup relations, realistic conflict theory, from a dynamic perspective. In this study, we focus on adolescents who are, according to the ‘impressionable years’-hypothesis, most likely to change in their rejection of equal opportunities. Realistic con...

This article presents results of a Dutch randomised experiment, challenging the ‘workfare’ paradigm, which is dominant in many countries. We study whether social assistance (SA) schemes with fewer conditions and more autonomy for recipients stimulate valuable but often overlooked unpaid socio-economic activities (USEA), which are not classified as...

The process of secularization in Western societies, in terms of the decline of individual religiosity, is often explained by way of cohort and period effects. In addition, there are many studies that focus on micro-level life course events that are considered to change individual religiosity. In this article, we use excellent panel data for the yea...

Dutch civil society is seen as well-equipped and known for its high level of civic involvement in various fields. For sustainability of civil society, however, it is crucial to understand to what extent civic involvement changes over time. Therefore, this article describes how civic involvement in the Netherlands has developed in the period 2008-20...

This article addresses what motivations volunteers have for volunteering for refugees and whether these motivations differ from or complement motivations to volunteer in general, such as included in the widely used measurement instrument, the Volunteer Function Inventory (VFI). We organized eight focus groups with volunteers for refugees (N = 44) a...

This article investigates European majority members’ perceptions of the prevalence of ethnic discrimination. We use individual-level data from the Eurobarometer ‘Discrimination in the EU’ series, covering 26 European countries and six years (2006, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2015, and 2019), enriched with contextual information on political elite discourses...

This article examines who volunteers for humanitarian organizations as compared to volunteering for other organizations versus people not volunteering, in the Netherlands. Using high-quality survey data (N = 5,050), we depart from a classic theoretical resource-based approach to study what forms of resources play a role in the likelihood to volunte...

While there is a substantive literature on the link between welfare states and individuals’ trust, little is known about the micro-linkage of the conditionality of welfare as a driver of trust. This study presents a unique randomized social experiment investigating this link. Recipients of the regular Dutch social assistance policy are compared to...

We propose to test theoretically driven hypotheses on the rejection of equal adoption rights for same‐sex couples with factors at the national, individual, and cross‐level interactions. Most recent data from the European Social Survey were used (2018–2019, n = 40.494). As expected, equal adoption rights are more strongly rejected in countries that...

In recent years, Europe witnessed several terrorist attacks by Islamist terrorists. To date, crucial questions are whether and how such events influence the European public’s resistance towards Muslims, and if such influence depends on the level of intergroup competition, both at the contextual and individual level. Using the European Social Survey...

This study applies the dynamic perspective of realistic conflict theory to assess whether and the extent that individuals’ negative attitudes toward ethnic minorities changed and were linked to changes in individuals’ economic situations. Employing Dutch panel data, we found that negative attitudes toward ethnic minorities were remarkably stable. D...

Objective This study explored associations between television exposure and public support for restrictive immigration policies in Europe, distinguishing general television exposure from exposure to television news. We explored explanations of generalized social distrust and perceived ethnic threat and, moreover, acknowledged cross-national variatio...

This study examines mechanisms and conditions under which ethnoreligious identification is related to support for out-group violence. It uses unique survey data collected among religious minorities and majorities in conflict and non-conflict regions in Indonesia and the Philippines. We find that strong ethno-religious identification is positively r...

In this contribution, we set out to rigorously test previous theoretical propositions that people tend to have consensual and cumulative rankings of exclusion of ethnic and religious outgroups, often referred to as ‘ethnic hierarchies’ constituting a shared and particular pattern of ranking different outgroups, preferably excluded from possible soc...

This data guide exhaustively documents the results of a 2005 survey of religious and secular attitudes and behavior in the Netherlands. The data files and additional documentation can be downloaded from EASY, the online archiving system of the Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Data Archiving and Networked Services (DAN...

This data guide exhaustively documents the results of a 2005 survey of religious and secular attitudes and behavior in the Netherlands. The data files and additional documentation can be downloaded from EASY, the online archiving system of the Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Data Archiving and Networked Services (DAN...

This data guide exhaustively documents the results of a 2005 survey of religious and secular attitudes and behavior in the Netherlands. The data files and additional documentation can be downloaded from EASY, the online archiving system of the Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Data Archiving and Networked Services (DAN...

This data guide exhaustively documents the results of a 2005 survey of religious and secular attitudes and behavior in the Netherlands. The data files and additional documentation can be downloaded from EASY, the online archiving system of the Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Data Archiving and Networked Services (DAN...

This data guide exhaustively documents the results of a 2005 survey of religious and secular attitudes and behavior in the Netherlands. The data files and additional documentation can be downloaded from EASY, the online archiving system of the Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Data Archiving and Networked Services (DAN...

Background Today the Dutch religious landscape is characterized by two opposite trends. On the one hand, there is a massive and dominant trend of religious disaffiliation which mostly affects the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches, while on the other hand the Netherlands also witnesses the emergence of several independent, e...

In this contribution the focus is on nationalism, i.e. the view that one’s own country and people are unique and superior, implying a negative comparison with regard to other national groups and countries. The research questions we set out to answer are: (1) what are the cross-national differences and trends in nationalism across Europe? (2) Which...

To what extent does religious identification promote collective efficacy and perceived injustice that contribute to explain support for interreligious violence in Indonesia? This overarching research question is inspired by theoretical insights starting from social identity theory, and noticeably enriched by collective action theories. We use high‐...

It is well documented that it is important to take selection effects into account when analysing social experiments. A Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) design usually prevents selection bias, but not when participation is voluntary. Despite the abundance of literature on the existence of selection bias, few studies provide in-depth insights on how...

Since the 1960s, public support for gender egalitarianism has risen substantially in many western countries. Although earlier research proposed that structural and cultural developments, such as educational expansion, declining religiosity, and the rise of women’s employment may explain this upward trend, these theoretical speculations have not yet...

In this study, we focus on a considered key value of the Netherlands: tolerance towards outgroups. We set out to answer the research questions: (1) what has been the longitudinal trend in social distance towards migrants, Muslims and ‘Gypsies’?; and (2) have there been (changes in) longitudinal differences between specific social categories?, in re...

The rise of conservative religion in the West threatens the enduring positive contribution of religion to civil society, if conservative churches, as often assumed, indeed generate more bonding than bridging social capital. Against this background, this study explores the civic engagement of evangelicals in the Netherlands. Two research questions a...

Like other Western countries, in the Netherlands women continue to demonstrate higher levels of religiosity than men. In this article, we set out to explain this Dutch religious gender gap regarding belief in God, prayer and church attendance. Using high quality survey data ( LISS 2015), a comprehensive model is built combining social and psycholog...

Previous public opinion studies argued that in the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Muslim citizens support gender equality less than non-Muslims, due to Islamic-patriarchal socialization. Deviating from this Orientalist narrative, we formulate a context-dependent agentic-socialization framework, which acknowledges religiosity's and gender...

In many secular Western countries, women continue to demonstrate higher levels of religiosity than men. But why does this religious gender gap persist? In this research note, we set out to explain the religious gender gap in the Netherlands for three dimensions of religiosity: belief in God, frequency of prayer and frequency of church attendance. U...

In the original publication of the article, Table 2 (Model 6) and Tables A1, A2, A3 in Appendix section contained some minor incorrectnesses. This has no impact on our conclusions, which remain unchanged. The correct tables are given below

This study investigates to what extent different dimensions of religiosity are differentially related to rejection of homosexuality in countries around the world and, moreover, to what extent these relationships can be explained by particular mediators: authoritarianism and traditional gender beliefs. The theoretical framework includes in particula...

9129.R2_Online_Appendices_final – Supplemental material for Re-Understanding Religion And Support For Gender Equality In Arab Countries

We aim to clarify a puzzling paradox: while shares of highly educated and non-religious individuals—who generally hold less prejudice—have increased in the Netherlands, levels of prejudice against ethnic minorities have yet risen over time. To solve the paradox, we use cross-sectional data from 1985 to 2011 in counterfactual analyses. In these anal...

Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic sociali...

This study investigates whether there are differences in informal social capital between people with a chronic illness and healthy individuals. We also test to what extent this relationship is mediated by individual characteristics and moderated by country-level characteristics. In contrast to previous research, we use representative recent and hig...

Why has the Netherlands witnessed such a strong process of secularization? This article examines this process very extensively. Based on modernization theory, it follows several social cultural developments in Dutch society over the last 50 years and distinguishes between effects on the individual level as well as on the level of society. We are ab...

This study revisits the crowding in hypothesis and contributes to the literature in two ways. First, in addition to total social spending, we examine whether different types of social spending increase social capital among their target groups. Second, we distinguish within- from between-country effects of social spending. Data from the European Soc...

This study tries to find out why certain congregations in the Netherlands have a more committed membership than other congregations and, thus, are less affected by processes of religious disaffiliation. To do this, data gathered among members of six evangelical megachurches together with data from a national probability sample are analyzed to addre...

Research has described the perceived social restrictions that people who suffer from celiac disease can experience, but never investigated their actual amount of social contacts as compared to a healthy population. Therefore, we focus on the question whether people who suffer from celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity have less informal s...

Evangelicals are generally considered culturally conservative regarding issues like abortion or homosexuality and sometimes also economically conservative regarding issues like tax reduction. But does this image also apply to Dutch evangelicals who live in a secular environment in which they constitute only a tiny fraction of the number of church m...

In this contribution, we investigate the extent to which the recent financial crisis has affected levels of political participation in general and more particularly within privileged and underprivileged societal groups in the Netherlands. We derive competing and complementary theoretical propositions about the possible effects of the economic downt...

Dutch society is characterized by a high degree of religious dis-affiliation and nonaffiliation and most religious communities are facing hard times in the Netherlands. But there are also exceptions. Against the contemporary current of ongoing secularization, some religious communities seem to thrive like never before and even attract new members....

Purpose: This study used longitudinal data to examine the influence of the religiosity of pre-adolescents with psychiatric problems on the course of mental health during adolescence. Methods: In the TRAILS clinical cohort of 543 pre-adolescents (10-12 years), mental health problems were assessed using self-report at baseline, T2 (12-14 years), T...

This study examines the relationship between important social, cultural, economic, and demographic changes and the rise of support for gender egalitarianism within the Dutch population between 1979 and 2012. Cohort replacement, educational expansion, secularization, and the feminization of the labor force are important processes that have taken pla...

This study tries to account for the relative success of six thriving evangelical congregations in the Netherlands. Data gathered among the audiences of these evangelical congregations as well as among a representative sample of the Dutch population are analyzed in view of the following research questions: (1) What was the previous religious affilia...

This study examined the idea that the rise of broadband Internet has contributed to an aggravation of the divide between those who are politically active and those who are not. It was hypothesized that both access to broadband Internet (as an individual-level characteristic) and broadband penetration (as a country-level characteristic) would streng...

This contribution focuses on the involvement of children and youth in conflicts between Muslims and Christians in the Philippines. Contemporary Filipino youth, especially in the southern part of the country, grows up amidst this conflict. At first, a brief background on Moro conflict in the Philippines is presented in order to understand the specif...

Testing propositions from ethnic competition theory, we examine contextual and individual determinants of support for restrictive immigration policies in 26 European Union member states between 2002 and 2013, a period characterized by enduring economic downturn. We hypothesize that natives in vulnerable economic positions, similar to many migrants,...

We address the relationship between educational attainment and radical right voting (i.e., voting for the PVV) in the Netherlands. We tested whether lower educated people are overrepresented among the electorate of the PVV – as often found in earlier research – and considered underlying explanations for this relationship. Using data derived from th...

This study examines the relationship between interreligious contact and negative attitudes towards the religious out-group. It uses unique survey data collected by the authors among Christian and Muslim students in Maluku and Yogyakarta (Indonesia) and Mindanao and Metro Manila (the Philippines). Even after taking self-selection effects into accoun...

Onderzoeksmethoden is een multidisciplinaire inleiding in de methoden van fundamenteel en praktijkgericht sociaal-wetenschappelijk onderzoek. Aan de hand van interessante en actuele voorbeeldonderzoeken besteden de auteurs aandacht aan het opstellen van een onderzoeksplan, uiteenlopende onderzoekstradities en onderzoeksontwerpen. Binnen elk van dez...

This contribution focuses on the involvement of children and youth in conflicts between Muslims and Christians in the Philippines. Contemporary Filipino youth, especially in the southern part of the country, grows up amidst this conflict. At first, a brief background on Moro conflict in the Philippines is presented in order to understand the specif...

This study integrates three theoretical perspectives provided by social identity theory, realistic group conflict theory and social dominance theory to examine the relationship between religious identification and interreligious contact. It relies on a unique dataset collected among Christian and Muslim students in ethnically and religiously divers...

Following the earlier work of the Dutch political scientist Middendorp on conservative views among the Dutch population, this study tries to find out if there is still a relationship between conservatism and religion. Earlier research revealed that also church members became less conservative over time and that the gap between church members and no...

This study examines how classroom and neighborhood ethnic diversity affect adolescents' tendency to form same- versus cross-ethnic friendships when they enter middle school. Hypotheses are derived from exposure, conflict, and constrict theory. Hypotheses are tested among 911 middle school students (43 classrooms, nine schools) in the Netherlands. M...

During the last three decades Dutch church attendance rates dropped considerably, while the relative share of volunteers in non-religious organizations decreased at a slower rate. This is an unexpected development given the positive association between religious involvement and volunteering. In this article, we try to account for this development b...

The authors delineate two broad streams of research, one more psychological focusing on intrapersonal religious orientations and the other more sociological focusing on extrapersonal religious dimension, both concerned with the religion and prejudice against ethnic minorities. The authors discuss robust relationships that in the course of nearly 60...

Trends in ethnocentric reactions among the Dutch population, 1979-2012 Based upon predictions from 1996 about future trends in ethnocentric reactions in the Netherlands, we investigate the trends in ethnocentric reactions among the general public from 1979 to 2012. We distinguish two forms of ethnocentric reactions: negative attitudes towards ethni...

The claim that ethnic diversity within the living environment would hamper bonding and bridging social capital has been studied extensively, producing highly inconsistent findings. We studied whether ethnic diversity effects depend on the geographic scale at which ethnic diversity is measured. We examined ethnic diversity effects on intra- and inte...

Evidence for the often-posited negative relation between ethnic diversity and various measures of social capital is burdened by difficulties measuring the levels of aggregation at which the indicators operate, the common use of cross-sectional data, and by the common omission of macro-level variables that plausibly confound the relation between eth...

This study examines latent aspects of conflict, namely contact avoidance towards ethno-religious out-groups in the Philippines where there is a clear four-decade old and violent conflict. Latent conflict is generally understood as a period or stage of a dynamic development of conflict escalation or progression (Deutsch 1973; Galtung 1996). It is of...

We test whether ethnic diversity in Dutch neighbourhoods and municipalities drives down associational involvement and build on earlier research in two important ways. First, we explicitly take into account the ethnic composition of local voluntary associations, distinguishing involvement in bonding (only in-group members) and bridging (with out-gro...

This study examines the relationship between interreligious contact and negative attitudes toward the religious outgroup among minority Christians and majority Muslims in Indonesia. It answers two research questions: Does interreligious contact reduce negative outgroup attitudes equally for minority Christians and majority Muslims? Are mediation by...

This study examined media exposure as an explanatory factor for individual and cross-national differences in self-assessed general health. In studying media exposure, traditional media (television, radio, and newspapers) and contemporary media (internet) were separately considered. Aside from hypotheses about the relation between media exposure and...

We test whether a larger percentage of non-Whites in neighborhoods decreases associational involvement and build on earlier research in three ways. First, we explicitly consider the ethnic composition of organizations, distinguishing involvement in bridging (with out-group members) and bonding (only in-group members) organizations. Second, we start...

We test whether ethnic diversity in Dutch neighbourhoods and municipalities drives down associational involvement and build on earlier research in two important ways. First, we explicitly take into account the ethnic composition of local voluntary associations, distinguishing involvement in bonding (only in-group members) and bridging (with out-gro...

In this study, we test whether Putnam’s general claim of a negative effect of ethnic diversity holds for (active and passive) involvement in three types of voluntary organizations: leisure, interest, and activist organizations. Using data from the European Social Survey (wave 1), we applied multilevel analyses distinguishing individuals, regions, a...

In this study we focus on underlying determinants of interethnic contact of natives within a large number of European regions. We use the ‘opportunity-preference-third parties’ framework to explain differences between social groups and distinguish interethnic contact with colleagues from interethnic friendship. Using the first wave of the European...

This paper investigates (trends and determinants of) individual combinations of religious believing and belonging in Europe from a cross-national and longitudinal perspective. Individual level data for the period 1981-2007 in 42 countries derived from the European Values Survey and the European Social Survey are harmonised and enriched with context...