Sociologist Frank van Tubergen has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of €3.5 million for a research project on social cohesion among young people with and without a migration background.
Tubergen’s project aims to better understand how social cohesion develops among young people growing up in increasingly diverse societies. Rather than focusing only on differences between immigrant and native youth, the research will examine relationships within and between a wide range of social groups, as well as different aspects of social cohesion, including friendship, trust, loneliness, and experiences of discrimination.
The study will collect data of 5,000 adolescents in the Netherlands who are followed over time. It will combine detailed information about young people’s social networks with data from a specially designed social media platform and Dutch register data.
“Young people across Europe are growing up in a time of increasing ethnic diversity, rising anti-immigrant attitudes, and the growing influence of social media,” says Van Tubergen. “Yet social cohesion is still often studied through a simple lens that compares immigrant and native youth. I want to move beyond that approach.”
“Today’s classrooms bring together many different groups of young people. At the same time, we see growing differences in views on migration and diversity. This project will help us understand how social cohesion develops both within and across these groups, and across different dimensions of social life.”
A unique aspect of the project is that its findings can be compared with a similar study led by Van Tubergen in 2010, making it possible to examine how patterns of social cohesion have changed over nearly two decades.
Frank Van Tubergen is theme leader Migration and Migrants at NIDI, professor at Utrecht University, and honorary professor at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences of University Groningen.
