About me

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

My PhD research explores whether and how (1) socialisation processes (local social influences) and the media (global social influences) shape ethnic majority attitudes and behaviours toward ethnic minorities, and whether and how (2) social norm and media interventions can effectively promote more positive attitudes and behaviours among ethnic majority members. To address the first question, I use systematic reviews and meta-analyses; to address the second, I use agent-based modelling and social network experiments.

Beyond this main focus, I am also interested in advancing statistical methods in the social and behavioural sciences, currently with a particular emphasis on hidden Markov models and exponential random graph models.