Nan Dirk de Graaf
Nan Dirk de Graaf (born 1958) is a Dutch sociologist working in Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is known for his work on social stratification, religion (with a focus on secularisation), political sociology, the impact of social mobility on a variety of social issues (e.g., health, cultural consumption, and political preferences), pro-social behaviour, as well as his books. Biography Nan Dirk de Graaf joined Nuffield College in 2007 and is an Official Fellow and a Professor in Sociology. He obtained his PhD at Utrecht University (1988) and was a post-doc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Education and Human Development in Berlin (1988-1989). De Graaf was a research fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy (1990-1995) and a full Professor in Sociology at Nijmegen University (2001-2007). Between 2003 and 2007 he was the chair of the Inter-university Centre for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). Research Social Stratification De Graaf’s work challenged some of the notions of the transmission of social capital as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, the effect of families’ social origin on educational attainment is dependent on economic capital and increasingly on cultural resources of privileged parents. De Graaf and colleagues, contrary to Bourdieu’s claims, demonstrate that it is not the elites that were successfully transmitting their cultural capital on their children’s educational attainment, but rather the cultivating behaviour (particularly in reading) of lower-educated parents that improved their children’s educational attainment. Furthermore, social stratification is determined by the degree of heterogamy displayed by the marriages within a society, and it is also the result of social capital. People with more weak ties have access to more information, which leads to better life chances. Consequences of Social Mobility Social mobility, either intergenerational or intragenerational, is often assumed to have various important consequences, e.g. for health, cultural consumption, political preferences, and happiness. A problem with investigating mobility effects is that social mobility is the linear transformation () of any two status variables and . Therefore, any regression equation predicting social mobility cannot be identified as all three terms are included. Michael Sobel had a theoretically elegant solution to this problem, the Diagonal Mobility Models (commonly known as Diagonal Reference Models, DRM). De Graaf and colleagues compared the DRM model with the conventional ones, and found it superior, and had applied DRMs to estimate the impact of: (1) intergenerational class mobility on political preferences; (2) intra- and inter-generational social mobility on happiness; (3) the education of husband and wife on cultural consumption; (4) class of wife and husband on their political preference and their class identity; (5) the impact of the education of husband and wife; (6) intergenerational educational mobility on health; Religion and Secularisation De Graaf maintains that despite secularisation, religion is still a central element of modern life. It shapes world-views, family lives, moral standards, as well as political preferences. With Kelley, De Graaf discovered that in secular societies children are more likely to become secular, but in secular societies parental religiosity is stronger positively associated