About me

Greetings and welcome to my webpage. My name is Jan-Willem and I am a PhD student at the Utrecht University Sociology department.

My PhD research examines (1) if and how socialisation (or local social influences) and the media (or global social influences) shape ethnic majority attitudes and behaviours towards ethnic minorities and (2) if and how social norm and media interventions can alter such attitudes and behaviours through promoting more tolerant attitudes towards ethnic minorities. To address the first research query, I employ systematic reviews and meta-analyses, while for the second, I utilize agent-based modeling and social network experiments.

Beyond this main research focus, I am also interested in advancing statistical methods in the social and behavioural sciences, particularly related to hidden Markov models and exponential random graph models.