PhD Researcher - Scientific project on Education-based social identities

The Faculty Social Sciences & Solvay Business School, Department Sociologie, Research Group Brussels Institute for Social and Population Studies is looking for a PhD-student with a doctoral grant. 

More concretely your work package, for the preparation of a doctorate, contains: 

You will be appointed to a scientific project on Education-based social identities funded by the Research Foundation—Flanders and led by VUB (supervisor: Bram Spruyt) and the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences of the University of Groningen (supervisors: Toon Kuppens and Namkje Koudenburg).

You will form part of the Research group Brussels Institute for Social and Population Studies  research cluster TOR.

Your work package for preparing a doctorate is informed by the growing societal discontent among lower-status groups and concerns about the dominance of the highly educated.

Against that background, this PhD project aims to achieve a better understanding of the particularities of education-based status processes by systematically comparing them with groups based on more purely economic grounds. To that end, we seek to answer three specific RQ’s that refer to the origins and consequences of education-based status and which cover the cognitive (RQ1), emotional/social (RQ2) and strategic (RQ3) dimensions of social status.

RQ1: What does a high/low education signal to others, how does this compare with categories based on income/ wealth, and are these characteristics related to social identity and socio-political attitudes?

RQ2: Does education-based status lead to a sense of entitlement, the feeling that one’s opinion is relevant and deserved to be heard, (RQ2a)? And if so, what effects does a sense of entitlement have for social interaction and behavior concerning political issues (RQ2b)?

RQ3: How do dominant groups react when the status quo concerning relations of dominance is openly questioned?

To answer these questions, the project will rely on both cross-sectional survey data, population-based experiments, and small group interaction studies that enable us to assess whether the manipulation in terms of (a) category salience or (b) threat of the status quo results in adaptations of thoughts and behavior. In close collaboration with your supervisors, you will design the concrete studies, carry out data collection, analyze the data, and report the results.

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base.