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Police administrators are looking for concrete pathways to fight the phenomenon of (ethnic) prejudice among members of the police force. Surprisingly, few studies have assessed the effectiveness of existing police ethics training programs on prejudice and social dominance orientation. Therefore, we assessed the impact of a 1-day training called the Holocaust, Police, and Human Rights (HPH) program on the attitudes related to ethnic prejudice and social dominance orientation of 223 members of the Belgian police. Analyses of three-wave panel data indicate that HPH training reduced ethnic prejudice and social dominance orientation. For ethnic prejudice, the reduced effects were maintained after 1 month in the follow-up study. However, the effect of training on prejudice was weaker for police officers who were more often exposed to victims and perpetrators of crime. No lasting effect of HPH training was found for social dominance orientation.

In this article, we engage with the emerging literature that studies the increased enrolment of first-generation college students (FGCS), that is, students from households where neither parent has obtained a bachelor’s /master’s degree. Our article answers two research questions. First, data from 2,338 first-year students are used to investigate the extent to which FGCS differ from continuing-generation college students (CGCS) concerning the reason why one enrols in university education. Second, to what degree do these motives explain differences in study choice? Our results show that FCGS, compared to CGCS, more strongly endorsed the economic investment motive and what we call the social investment motive, that is, the motivation to become a role model for one’s community. In addition, our findings reveal that the choice for more economically rewarding fields of study is related to these motives to start a university education. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings.

When choosing between political candidates of different educational levels, do voters show ingroup bias or base their vote choice on candidates’ perceived competence? We aim to investigate how (fictional) political candidates of different educational levels are evaluated and voted for, how this is affected by voters’ educational level, and the role of perceived (Study 1) and manipulated competence (Study 2). Higher educated participants preferred higher to less educated candidates over and above their level of competence, particularly when they identified strongly with their educational level. This reflects ingroup bias among the higher educated. Less educated participants preferred higher educated candidates in Study 1, but did not prefer higher educated candidates when competence was manipulated independently from education in Study 2. The less educated, unlike the higher educated, therefore, seem to show deference to the assumed competence of the higher educated, because it disappears when more reliable competence information is available.

During adolescence young people not only strongly compare themselves with each other, they also monitor and judge each other based on gender norms. Therefore, this article focuses on the interpersonal dynamics of gender conformity among adolescents. The central research question is whether adolescents conform to gender norms in order to ‘fit in’? First, we study how adolescents come to internalise (pressure for gender conformity from oneself) and externalise gender norms (behaving in gender typical ways). Second, we assess the potential social benefits of gender conformity by studying the association between satisfaction with friendships and different aspects of gender conformity. Multi-group structural equation modelling was used to assess differences between adolescent girls (n = 631) and boys (n = 633) in Belgium (Mage = 19.52). Benevolent sexism predicted adolescents’ internalisation and externalisation of gender norms. For boys, the pressure for gender conformity from others predicted the externalisationof gender norms. In general, adolescents benefited from higher satisfaction with friendships when they endorsed benevolent sexism and translated normative pressures into gender typical behaviours. Our findings urge for increasing awareness to recognize subtle manifestations of sexism and to reduce the pressure young people experience to conform to gender norms.

Despite the group of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMS) being very diverse, their educational outcomes are homogeneous and rather weak in many countries. In Flanders (Belgium) the educational trajectory of NAMS starts in a separate program that prepares them for their transition to regular secondary education. Rather than seeing the outcomes of reception education as the result of the behaviour of individual teachers and students, we argue that this problem should be addressed using a field approach that directs attention to the structural relationships between reception education and regular education. We rely on Bourdieu’s agency-structure bridging concept of social fields to reveal this relative position and the implicit assumptions or doxa that sustain it. Administrative data on teachers and students in secondary education, as well as policy texts, the transcripts of 37 interviews with teachers and the fieldnotes from the observations of 28 admission councils were analysed.

Educational tracking has been studied abundantly in previous research. However, the transitions of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMS) to these (tracked) educational settings are understudied. To facilitate the transition of NAMS to regular secondary education, many countries organise reception classes. This is a separate form of education for NAMS between 12 and 18 years old that immerses them in the language of instruction (i.e. Dutch) and prepares them for participation into regular secondary education. Studying the organisation of reception education is essential to evaluate the inclusiveness of education for NAMS. We take two schools in Flanders (Belgium) as case studies to study in-depth how the grouping of students in reception education influences which track NAMS enter in regular education. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the two schools (2017-2019) and quantitative data on four generations of NAMS (2014-2018) were collected in one of the schools. The five conceptual dimensions of tracking, as developed by Domina et al. (2019. "Beyond Tracking and Detracking: The Dimensions of Organizational Differentiation in Schools." Sociology of Education 92 (3): 293-322), were used to analyse the data. The results show that the grouping of NAMS has a distinct impact on their transition to the tracked education system.

The educational aspirations of immigrants are often high, inspired by the hopes of newly gained opportunities available in the host country. This is also the case for students between 12 and 18 years old who have recently migrated to a new country (NAMS). However, they often perform below their non-immigrant peers and are overrepresented in vocational education. In Flanders (Belgium), the educational trajectory of NAMS starts in a separate programme that prepares them for their integration into regular education. This study aims to gain insight into how the interplay between pressures from the education system, the gatekeeping function of teachers and the agency of students and their parents unfolds. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted across two schools (2017-2019). The analysis shows how teachers in reception education try to align idealistic aspirations of NAMS with the options that the regular education system offers. We use Clark's concept of "cooling out" as an analytical tool to describe the incremental process that takes place.

Police integrity is a crucial steppingstone in police administrators’ long-term goals of obtaining legitimacy and yielding citizens’ evaluations of the police as a legitimate institution. This paper investigates the relationship between work-related experiences and police integrity, as well as the degree to which this relationship is mediated by well-known socio-political attitudes such as authoritarianism, ethnic prejudice, and social dominance orientation. Using structural equation modelling of the responses provided by 1,255 members of the Belgium police, the work-related characteristics, socio-political attitudes, and organisational dimensions of police integrity are related to three outcomes of police integrity. Results show that police officers in the field and those who had more frequent contacts with victims and perpetrators of crimes evaluate misconduct to be less serious, are less willing to say that they would report the behaviour, and advocate less severe disciplinary sanctions. Generalised socio-political attitudes related to prejudice mediate work-related experiences and perceptions of peer police integrity and are in turn negatively related to police integrity outcomes. These findings illustrate that police officers do not operate in a social vacuum as these general socio-political attitudes are non-occupation specific. This suggests that police integrity training programmes not only need to target work-related characteristics, such as an open culture to discuss problems, but also need to target general socio-political attitudes to foster police integrity.

Een kritische randvoorwaarde voor een succesvol aanklampend beleid inzake (ongeoorloofd) schoolverzuim is het beschikken over accurate registratiedata. De afgelopen jaren werd in Vlaanderen, in het bijzonder door de implementatie van het informaticasysteem DISCIMUS, grote vooruitgang geboekt in het registreren van afwezigheid. Via DISCIMUS registreren scholen elke halve dag afwezigheid. Daardoor is het mogelijk (ongeoorloofde) afwezigheid in Vlaanderen te beschrijven op een niveau en met een graad van detail die niet eerder bereikt werd. Het is daarbij belangrijk om naast de ontwikkeling van de technische infrastructuur te monitoren wat de kenmerken en eigenschappen van de aldus verzamelde data precies zijn. In dit artikel dragen we bij aan deze doelstelling door een actuele beschrijving te geven van registratiegegevens over (ongeoorloofde) afwezigheid in Vlaanderen. De volgende vragen worden beantwoord: 1) wat is de verspreiding van ongeoorloofde afwezigheid? 2) Wat is de relatie tussen ongeoorloofde en geoorloofde afwezigheid? (3) Wat is de relatie tussen ongeoorloofde afwezigheid en de onderwijsuitkomst?

Investing in childcare provision makes good economic sense. Yet, conventional and behavioral market failure theory suggest that the benefits of childcare may fail to materialize because parents are irrational childcare consumers. The current study examines whether parent satisfaction with childcare is symptomatic of this imperfect rationality. Data were drawn from the MeMoQ project, the first rigorous baseline study of childcare quality in Flanders (Dutch-speaking Community of Belgium). Classroom quality was assessed in 380 infant/toddler childcare settings and survey data were collected from 2650 parents. Findings from multilevel models indicate that parent satisfaction is only modestly associated with classroom quality, as well as with childcare type. On a more personal level, parent satisfaction is predicted by partner status, frequency of attendance, migrant status, and how parents perceive their options in childcare. The results demonstrate that while the question of parent satisfaction with childcare has a glaringly obvious answer, it is less predictably irrational than commonly anticipated. The explanatory power of our models is limited and warrants further inquiry into the more complex nature of parent-childcare relations.

Threats are omnipresent in daily life and are robustly linked to important social phenomena like intergroup violence and social attitudes. While perceptions of single threats are well-studied, much less is known about the patterns of interrelations between multiple perceived threats, what we call threat networks. We conducted correlational class analyses on three waves of the European Social Survey to identify groups of people who share the same threat network (i.e., similarities in the relational structure between multiple threats). Our findings reveal four different threat networks which are characterized by different constraints. One group organizes threats by differentiating personal from collective threats to society, a second group differentiates abstract from concrete threats, a third group differentiates between threats to the societal and personal status quo, and the fourth group showed similar strength of connections between all perceived threats. Our results further show that individuals with similar sociodemographic characteristics, especially those with similar levels of education, are likely to have similar interconnections between multiple threats. Furthermore, the way people structure threats predicts political participation above sociodemographic characteristics. Our research highlights that individual differences in interconnections between threats are crucial for understanding and explaining reactions to perceived threats.

Inspired by Ann Swidler’s toolkit theory, this qualitative study aims to achieve a better understanding of social class differences in parenting practices and, in turn, in young people’s leisure time use. To that end, 32 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with parents from middle- and working-class families were conducted in a small city in Belgium. An inductive thematic analysis revealed substantial social class differences with respect to three parenting practices: (1) setting an example, (2) resolving conflicts and (3) facilitating leisure activities. The interviews showed that these differences were mainly linked to social class differences in parents’ resources: working-class parents more often lacked flexible time, financial resources, an extensive social network on which they could rely and the institutionally required attitudes, skills and experience to engage in the above-mentioned parenting practices. We conclude that young people’s (continued) institutional leisure participation puts high requirements on parents and not all (working-class) parents are able to live up to such requirements. In that way, contemporary leisure settings reproduce rather than mitigate inequality in the use of leisure time.

During the past decade, a rich literature emerged focusing on “psychological capital,” a multidimensional concept encompassing self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience. So far psychological capital has been predominantly studied in the areas of work and organizational psychology, management, and organizational behavior. This paper argues that (1) the relevance of psychological capital is much broader than assumed so far and (2) that not only the outcomes but also the (social) origins and sources of psychological capital need to be studied. More specifically, the key questions that we address in this paper concern (1) how the notion of psychological capital can be integrated into a broader capital framework that allows studying (the reproduction of) social inequalities, (2) what such integration adds to disciplines such as psychology and sociology, (3) and which avenues for further research can be derived from such framework? Informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we argue that psychological capital is the missing link to develop a comprehensive framework for studying (the reproduction of) social inequalities. Based on our theory building, we develop an interdisciplinary research agenda.

Traditional gender beliefs and gender prejudice (sexism) are thought to play a key role in the reproduction of gender inequality. It is known that such traditional gender beliefs are more common among strongly religious people. Europe is facing a growing population of religious, often immigrant youth from Islamic countries such as Turkey and Morocco. Against that background, we investigate how ambivalent sexism is related to adolescents’ religious affiliation (being Christian or Muslim), religiosity (how important religion is in one's life), perceived pressure for religious conformity and ethnic background (native, Turkish, Moroccan) by performing multivariate multilevel regression analyses. We rely on data from two independent samples gathered in 2013 and 2018 by the Youth Research Platform among Dutch-speaking boys (N = 1637) and girls (N = 2058) between 14 and 18 years old. The results show the gendered ways in which religion and ambivalent sexism towards women are related. For girls, ambivalent sexism wasrelated to perceived pressure for religious conformity and ethnic background (more group-level aspects). Boys’ ambivalent sexism was related to more individual-level aspects such as higher religiosity. No differences were found between Muslim or Christian youth., Traditional gender beliefs and gender prejudice (sexism) are thought to play a key role in the reproduction of gender inequality. It is known that such traditional gender beliefs are more common among strongly religious people. Europe is facing a growing population of religious, often immigrant youth from Islamic countries such as Turkey and Morocco. Against that background, we investigate how ambivalent sexism is related to adolescents’ religious affiliation (being Christian or Muslim), religiosity (how important religion is in one's life), perceived pressure for religious conformity and ethnic background (native, Turkish, Moroccan) by performing multivariate multilevel regression analyses. We rely on data from two independent samples gathered in 2013 and 2018 by the Youth Research Platform among Dutch-speaking boys (N = 1637) and girls (N = 2058) between 14 and 18 years old. The results show the gendered ways in which religion and ambivalent sexism towards women are related. For girls, ambivalent sexism wasrelated to perceived pressure for religious conformity and ethnic background (more group-level aspects). Boys’ ambivalent sexism was related to more individual-level aspects such as higher religiosity. No differences were found between Muslim or Christian youth. © 2021 European Sociological Association.

Over the past decades, the education system has gradually grown into a central and universal institution of society, the impact of which plays a primary role in economic and social stratification. This stratification, and the way this inequality is legitimated, contains serious moral judgements that favor the higher educated over the less educated. This article focuses on the socio-psychological consequences of living in such “schooled societies” for those who are more or less successful in education. We use three waves of the European Quality of Life survey with data on 65,208 individuals across 36 countries. We investigate (1) the extent to which different educational groups feel dissatisfied about and misrecognized by virtue of their education and (2) whether the centrality of the education system in society broadens the gap between educational groups in their dissatisfaction with education and feelings of misrecognition. Results show that (1) the less educated are more likely to feel misrecognized and dissatisfied with their education than the higher educated, and (2) in countries where education is more central, the education gap in feelings of misrecognition is substantially larger.

Concerns about teacher attrition and associated teacher shortages are widespread. This multilevel study explores the relative importance of three main mechanisms through the investigation of relevant teacher, school, and country characteristics: (A) selection mechanisms related to who becomes a teacher; (B) early career support resources related to entering the profession; and (C) long-term support resources related to developing a teaching career. Using the 2018 Teaching And Learning International Survey (TALIS), retention intention is analysed using information from 11 613 early-career teachers in 3998 schools in 31 countries. Results underline the importance of selection processes at individual and country level.

Although it is well established that contemporary school-based pedagogy continues to be primarily oriented towards a middle-class habitus, little research has documented how crucial elements of such habitus, like an expressive self-conception and emotional management, became integrated in the educational institute and its philosophy. Therefore, this article reconstructs how the current middle-class habitus was institutionalized and what type of personality structuring it eventually replaced. We study the shifts in pedagogical ideas, the role of education and the position of teachers and relate these to structural factors such as state-formation and changing class structures. We draw on the process-relational approach of Elias and Bourdieu and perform a content analysis of 480 pedagogical advice articles published in Flanders (Belgium) between 1880 and 2010, to demonstrate how a discourse of formalization and self-control has been substituted by a more informalized and expressive view. We conclude with a reflection on the impact of such an expressive pedagogical regime on the reproduction of class inequality.

Classical and recent accounts of education posit that education legitimately, and authoritatively, classifies individuals to positions of lower or higher status. However, despite these general theoretical claims, empirical evidence that provides an in-depth picture of the relationship between educational attainment and social status remains scarce. In this paper, based on a dataset of 31 countries (International Social Survey Programme), we investigate the extent to which education is related to subjective social status, the degree to which this is seen as legitimate, and how this relationship varies between countries. We contextualize this relationship with the influence of the centrality of education in countries (operationalized as the share of higher educated). Results showed that education is an important source of subjective social status for individuals across all countries, and is seen as relatively legitimate and uncontroversial among all educational groups. Moreover, among those who perceive education to be more important for status, subjective status differences between educational groups are larger. Additionally, in countries with larger shares of higher educated, educational differences in subjective social status correlate more strongly with whether or not people obtained a degree of higher (tertiary) education. Lastly, the relationship between education and subjective social status in these countries is more independent from other sources of status, such as income and gender. It therefore seems to be that as higher education becomes more central and widely shared in a society, rather than leveling social differences, ironically it also becomes more distinctive and diagnostic in distinguishing people along group lines.

It is widely believed that the school context plays a crucial role in teacher burnout. Against that background, we (1) critically review existing empirical multilevel studies on teacher burnout and (2) use data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 to assess the school-level variance and its correlates in emotional exhaustion, cynical depersonalization, and personal accomplishment in 2,300 primary (183 schools) and 2,700 lower secondary (190 schools) teachers in the Flemish-speaking community of Belgium, and 2,135 lower secondary (120 schools) teachers in the French-speaking community of Belgium. Our results reveal that (1) conceptual confusion exists surrounding school-context variables and (2) the between-school variance in teacher burnout is small. Implications for educational policy and teacher burnout research are discussed.

One of the clearest manifestations of how gender norms come into play, is the overrepresentation of men and women in gender stereotypical occupations. Therefore, this paper studies occupational preferences and their relationship with perceived gender typicality, perceived pressure for gender conformity from friends and discontent with gender boundaries among preadolescents (N = 795) in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders). Discriminant analysis enables us to develop an original and sensitive measure for gendered preferences. Subsequently, we use multivariate regression analyses to study the variation in gendered occupational preferences. Models are separately estimated for boys (n = 395) and girls (n = 400) and further include their academic self-concept, socio-economic and socio-cultural background. The main finding of this study indicates that boys’ and girls’ stereotypical occupational preferences are differently related to gender norms. While boys’ gender stereotypical preferences relate to their perceived pressure for gender conformity from friends, this does not apply to girls. For girls, the results indicate that their stereotypical occupational preferences reflect an important part of their gender typical identity. Moreover, girls who feel confident about their academic capabilities aspire less gender stereotypical occupations. The results also indicate the relevance of considering socio-economic and socio-cultural background variables when studying preadolescents’ occupational preferences.

Contains fulltext : 240517.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises (e.g., the Great Recession, the refugee crisis) which had a tremendous impact on (some) societies. Typically, these crises were accompanied by divisive public discourses that rely heavily on a sharp and moralistic us-them distinction. Especially extreme right- and left-wing parties have adopted such conflict discourses and have gained much electoral support. Against this background, this paper has two objectives. First, data from the European Quality of Life Survey from 2003 to 2016 in 27 countries are used to provide a comprehensive overview of the salience of perceived societal conflicts between seven pairs of groups between countries and across time. We find substantial differences between countries and longitudinal trend variation in the salience of perceived societal conflict. For example, in Eastern European countries more economic conflict is perceived, while in Western European countries people perceive more cultural conflict between different ethnic and religious groups. Second, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses reveal that specific perceptions of conflict are structured by an underlying general orientation, generalized conflict thinking: people’s tendency to perceive society through the lens of conflict regardless of the specificity of these groups. The measure for generalized conflict thinking is metric equivalent across a large sample of countries. This demonstrates that generalized conflict thinking can be used as a social indicator for comparative research. In the conclusion we elaborate on the implications of our findings and develop a research agenda regarding generalized conflict thinking. 22 mei 2021 40 p.

Typical of the teaching profession is the multitude of actors that comment on and evaluate teachers’ work. Previous studies indicate that teachers feel that their work is relatively underappreciated in society. Little is known about the dynamics that explain apparent variation in this feeling. Based on data from 66,593 teachers in 25 countries we study variation of Perceived Societal Appreciation (PSA). We find robust evidence that a change within countries in PISA scores predicts a within country trend in levels of PSA. In the conclusion we critically engage with contemporary OECD policies by arguing that inducing a crisis mentality about educational quality risks accomplishing the exact opposite than what one aims for.

For young people with a migration background it has never been easier to create and maintain a bond with their country of origin (further: feelings of ethnic connectedness). Previous research has already revealed the importance of such feelings of ethnic connectedness for (young) people’s subjective well-being. In this study we investigate whether the relationship between the presence and the degree of ethnic connectedness and life satisfaction is moderated by the ethnic school composition. We study this relationship by performing multilevel analyses on 2091 adolescents (aged 14–18 years old) from nine different ethnic groups. Our results shed light on the importance of the ethnic composition of the school in two ways. First, the proportion of adolescents from one’s own ethnic group at school is related to higher life satisfaction. Second, the relationship between life satisfaction and the presence of ethnic connectedness is moderated by the extent to which schools are ethnically diverse. More specifically, ethnically diverse schools have a positive influence on the life satisfaction of young people who feel connected to their ethnic group, whereas ethnic diversity at school is negatively related to life satisfaction among young people who do not feel connected to their ethnic group. In the conclusion we elaborate on the implications of our findings.

Even though boredom has been shown to be a distinct emotional experience that is prevalent among youth and that predicts a wide range of personal and societal problems, it remains often overlooked and poorly understood. Therefore, based on the Flemish data from the 2018 edition of the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being, this article studies boredom proneness among young adolescents (average age = 12 years). Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the short version of the Boredom Proneness Scale–Child Version contains two dimensions referring to internal—a difficulty in keeping oneself interested and entertained—and external stimulation—the need for change and variety in the situations one encounters. Subsequent regression analyses demonstrated that both boredom proneness and social conditions predict aspects of subjective well-being (i.e., leisure boredom and life satisfaction). Our analyses revealed complex interactions between individual differences and social conditions with respect to aspects of well-being.