How do people with a migration background view the arrival of new migrants to the Netherlands? Due to the sharply increased population with a migration background, this question is more important than ever. This project answers this question through a large-scale survey, examining how both people with and without a migration background assess different profiles of new migrants. Subsequently, the consequences of these attitudes for party preferences are investigated.

For decades, concerns have been raised about the declining, ageing audience for classical music, with both scholars and policy makers suggesting it could lead to the art form’s decline. There is a flourishing research tradition on cultural participation, but little is known about the ageing audience. This project aims to explain the driving forces behind the ageing audience by developing an age-period-cohort perspective. The project harmonizes survey data collected over long time periods, collects survey data about attendance, and analyzes longitudinal data on participation. The project also develops a predictive model to forecast the size of classical music audiences.

An increasing proportion of older adults in Europe participate in paid work after retirement, but it is largely unknown what they do and whether this is positive or negative for their subjective well-being. In this Rubicon project, I hypothesize that the relationship between post-retirement work and well-being is conditional upon the types of post-retirement work (e.g. part-time, occupation, self-employment) and the country-specific pension context (e.g. more or less liberal). The innovation of this project is threefold. First, the project is innovative by unravelling the heterogeneity in types of post-retirement work (micro level). Second, cross-national differences in pension contexts are incorporated to explain the heterogeneity in work types across countries (macro level). Third, the project focuses on different work types in different pension contexts (micro-macro linkage) to better understand retirees’ well-being. During my stay at the University of Manchester, I will compare European countries using large-scale cross-national data. I will add data of the UK to this dataset because of its liberal approach towards work and pensions that is unique in Europe. Moreover, my stay at the University of Manchester offers me the unique opportunity to work with leading experts in social policy and well-being research.

In 2017, over 46,000 children in the Netherlands lived apart from their biological parents in formal care arrangements (e.g. foster families, residential stay). These children vary enormously in the out-of-home care settings they experienced. To date, we know little about this diversity and its long-term consequences for adult functioning. Which children encounter problems in adjusting to adult roles (e.g. as partner, parent, employee, and law-abiding citizen)? Moreover, we also know little about the resources they can use to counteract adult adversity. Theory suggests that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to experience adult adversity because they lack parental structure and control, economic resources, emotional attachment, or social support to develop successfully. However, empirical studies that jointly test these interlinked mechanisms are scarce. In this Veni-project I close this knowledge gap by studying out-of-home care pathways and the mechanisms by which these pathways lead to adverse outcomes concerning family formation, employment, and crime in adulthood. This Veni-project is innovative in three major aspects. First, my project is substantively innovative as it is the first examining consequences of out-of-home care using entire histories of youth care arrangements, and focusing on outcomes in crucial domains of adult functioning: family formation, employment and crime. Second, my study is theoretically innovative as I propose and test a new integrated conceptual model linking diversity in out-of-home care pathways to variation in adult outcomes, and examine under which economic, emotional and social circumstances adult adversity is exacerbated. Third, my study is methodologically innovative as I implement a longitudinal approach uniquely combining quantitative data from two sources: register data on an entire population-based birth cohort of children in out-of-home care from Statistics Netherlands, and information coded from case files of several foster care organizations for a subgroup of my birth cohort.

Visotors grant connected to ongoing NWO-VICI research programme "Ageing workers in an ageing society: Labour force transitions and work in late life (NWO file number: 453-14-001)"