Sociologist. Quantitativist. University of Neuchâtel.
For the project “The COVID generation: Identifying risks and protective factors for young people’s pathways through the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland”, the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS) and the Institute of Sociology at University of Neuchâtel are recruiting:
– A post-doctoral researcher (80-100%) in Lausanne
– A scientific collaborator (50%) in Neuchâtel
Application deadline: 10th of December.
I’m happy to announce a new project on attitudes towards immigrants funded by the SNIS (hiring soon). In collaboration with Tobias Müller, Eva Green, Sergi Pardos-Prado, and Marco Pecoraro, we’re going to examine individual level attitudes towards immigrants and foreigners across time and contexts. The project will examine three related research areas — the role of neighbourhoods in shaping attitudes, socialisation, and the stability or persistence of attitudes. With that, we hope to clarify the relationship between individual background, context, and negative attitudes towards foreigners.
This project is financed by the Swiss Network for International Studies.
It’s been a long time in the making, and took long to appear on the web, but our paper on attitudes towards foreigners is finally available at the International Migration Review. in this paper, we use data from the Swiss Household Panel to examine individual attitudes towards equal opportunities for foreigners and Swiss citizens. Various tests show that we indeed tap into attitudes towards immigrants. We find that individuals with low levels of education tend to oppose immigrants, something quite established in the literature. By contrast, there is evidence that individuals with high levels of education are less positive when their risk of unemployment increases. The negative attitudes of people with low levels of education can be explained by their values and beliefs, but not the association with the risk of unemployment for individuals with high levels of education. We interpret this that both values and economic factors are important for explaining attitudes toward foreigners, despite many recent contributions dismissing economic factors at the individual level.
Didier Ruedin 