Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "An Economic Perspective on the Role of Family Structure and Education as Determinants of Crime" "Kristof De Witte" "Teacher Training, FEB, Leuven" "This research project employs quasi-experimental methods on administrative population data to investigate whether family structure and education have a causal impact on the children’s criminal outcomes. Within this broad research agenda, contributions are made in four specific research topics. I first use family fixed effects and multiple births as an instrument to estimate whether birth order and family size causally influence children’s propensity to engage in crime. Next, I employ coarsened exact matching and a bounding analysis to explore whether children raised in same-sex families are more likely to engage in crime than children raised in different-sex families. I then consider education as a potential determinant of crime using regression discontinuity design. By comparing criminal outcomes of students who barely passed and barely failed standardized exit exams in the Netherlands, I estimate the effect of high school dropout on crime. These students have similar levels of human capital but different diploma status. Finally, I investigate the effect of a school track on crime. By observing lists of students' high school preferences in Finland, I compare criminal outcomes of students who barely failed to enrol into the general track (and instead enrolled into the vocational track) with the outcomes of students who barely succeeded to enrol. These students have similar levels of human capital but are enrolled in a different track." "Education based status: An empirical assessment of the institutional effects of education." "Bram Spruyt" "Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences and Solvay Business School, Sociology" "In this project we assess the particularities and consequences of education-based status in contemporary Western societies. More specifically, we focus on the prevalence of intergroup education-based categorization and differentiation and its consequences for public opinion and political participation. To this end, we seek to answer three interrelated research questions. First, does the relationship between educational attainment and social status vary systematically according to characteristics of the institutional context of different countries? Secondly, how sensitive are people to references to their educational attainment and which role does the field of study play in this matter? And finally, what behavioral and attitudinal consequences does (self)-categorization in terms of educational attainment have? Or put differently, how does education-based status effects come about in practice? . To answer these questions we rely on both cross-national and single country studies as well as on population-based experiments that assess whether subtle manipulations of the salience of ‘education based labels’ or the awareness of the ‘educational composition of the context’ result in adaptations of thought and behavior." "Counter-currents of migration and faith: the involvement of Senegalese migrants and their children within the religious education sector in Senegal." "Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (CeMIS)" "In a climate of fear about Islamic radicalisation and militancy, Muslim youths, especially those who are socialised in institutions of Islamic learning, have attracted overwhelmingly negative attention. Western societies look uneasily upon youngsters from Muslim immigrant communities, and view their acquisition of Islamic knowledge with suspicion, especially if they travel abroad to study. Situating itself at the intersection of the anthropology of religion, education research and migration studies, this research explores the involvement of West African diasporas within the religious education sector in Senegal, a major hub of Islam in West Africa. Firstly, it seeks to trace how sojourns for the purpose of religious education – during school holidays or longer periods – shape how the children of the West African diaspora engage with Islam, and how they integrate such experiences once returned to the West. Through this, I hope to shed light more broadly on the challenges children of Muslim migrants to the West face in a context of growing Islamophobia and narrowing social and economic opportunities. Secondly, the project aims to generate insights into the role that diaspora involvement, in the form of funding as well as ideas, plays within the Islamic education sector in Senegal, thus furthering scholarship on the dynamics of change within Islamic educational systems in West Africa more widely." "Training tools for explaining and reducing ethnic discrimination in the fields of education, health care, housing and labour" "Peter Stevens, Piet Van Avermaet, Stijn Baert, Sara Willems, Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe, Eva Derous" "Department of Work, Organisation and Society, Department of Linguistics, Department of Economics, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Department of Sociology" "EdisTools aims to get a better understanding of ethnic inequality and ethnic discrimination in the social domains of health, housing, education and work, so that (often well-intentioned or unconscious) processes that give rise to it can be addressed. EdisTools wants to develop both innovative, scientific knowledge and user-friendly training tools that service providers and organizations in these domains can use.    " "The value of job amenities and its impact on inequality and returns to education" "Dirk Czarnitzki" "Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation (main work address Leuven)" "The overarching goal of this project is to identify how workers value jobs, which is essential to evaluate the current state of the labour market in terms of efficiency, inequality and returns to education. We start by evaluating the accuracy-cost tradeoff of three existing methods eliciting the willingness to pay for job characteristics in general and for job security in particular. Then we use the most cost-effective approach to determine whether there are diminishing marginal returns to job quality improvements, which hitherto have been assumed constant in the literature (e.g. Maestas et al., 2019). Combined, this allows us to estimate job quality adjusted measures of earnings inequality in the United States in terms of gender, race, education and the income distribution. Moreover, the value of job security to employees can be used to explain the prevalence of stable employment contracts despite their moral hazard risks. Our results are also relevant to evaluate studies of job mobility and entrepreneurship which often invoke job amenities to rationalise moves to lower paying (self-)employment (e.g. Hamilton, 2000). Finally, the insights we generate on eliciting and aggregating preferences are relevant throughout society, from politicians weighing policy gains and losses to marketeers designing new consumer products and pharmaceutical companies balancing medicinal side effects. " "The education and communication pillars of integrated care for atrial fibrillation." "Hein Heidbuchel" "Cardiovascular diseases (CARDIOVASC), Translational Pathophysiological Research (TPR)" "Atrial fibrillation (AF) is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. As stated in the 2016 European Guidelines on the management of AF, there is an urgent need for a more structured and efficient care system in this growing AF population in order to reduce the burden on patients, the society, the healthcare system and the economy. A proposed strategy is to deliver care through 'interdisciplinary nurse-led AF centers', that have shown to improve guideline-adherence and outcomes in a cost-effective way. 'Integrated care' requires streamlined communication between stakeholders (cardiologists, general practitioners, other specialists, care givers) on one hand, and improved education of patients on the other hand, to increase their motivation, empower them for more self-care and allowing shared decision-making. However, there are no blueprints available on how this 'integrated care' should be implemented. Hospitals often have no predefined pathways or support systems to evaluate and follow-up AF patients in a systematic way and to communicate their management to different stakeholders. For patient education, a more structured and individualised approach is indispensable. Finally, integrated AF care requires a redesign of daily practice making use of AF nurses to provide patient education, to coordinate care and to facilitate communication between stakeholders. This project aims to evaluate which elements of integrated care contribute most to improved outcomes and how proven therapies can most effectively and most cost-efficiently be delivered to AF patients. We will focus on two main topics: 1) communication within the AF center, and between the AF center and different stakeholders by means of an 'AF passport'; 2) targeted education of patients, aiming for more cost-efficient knowledge increase and better clinical outcomes. We will use a randomised controlled trial design in three large cardiology centers." "The effectiveness of pain neuroscience education in patients at risk for unfavorable outcome following surgery for lumbar radiculopathy: A multicentric randomized controlled trial" "Jo Nijs, Wouter Van Bogaert" "Interuniversity Centre For Health Economics Research, Physiotherapy, Human Physiology and Anatomy" "This study aims to assess the effectiveness of perioperative pain neuroscience education (PPNE) in patients who are at risk for unfavorable outcome following surgery for lumbar radiculopathy. Although most of these surgeries are successful, 23-28% of patients report chronic pain and disability following surgery. Many preoperative factors are associated with an unfavorable surgical outcome, including maladaptive cognitive and emotional factors. Yet, current preoperative education (‘back school’), which focuses on anatomy and biomechanics of the lumbar spine, is ineffective in changing those maladaptive factors. PPNE was introduced as an innovative therapy that addresses modifiable risk factors in patients undergoing surgery for lumbar radiculopathy. PPNE reconceptualizes pain, informs patients about their pain development and is wellestablished for improving maladaptive cognitions in several chronic pain-populations. Hence, we hypothesize that PPNE will be more effective than perioperative back school in improving postsurgical quality of life, pain, analgesic use and return to work in patients at risk for unfavorable outcome following surgery for lumbar radiculopathy. First, a multicentric randomized controlled trial will compare the therapy effects of PPNE to perioperative back school in these at-risk patients. Next, the mediating role of changes in maladaptive cognitions, such as fear of movement and pain catastrophizing, on the therapy effect of PPNE will be investigated" "Diverging pathways: a longitudinal study of the role of the school in differentially shaping the learning trajectories of native and Turkish adolescents in Flanders." "Bart Meuleman" "Centre for Sociological Research" "My doctoral project addresses one of the major challenges of Western European societies, namely the achievement gap between minority and non-minority youth. This study aims at enhancing our understanding of why, on average, minority pupils are less successful in school than majority group youngsters. For this purpose, data from the CILS4EU project - a unique  longitudinal and cross-national survey among secondary school students, as well as their parents and teachers -, and the Flemish LeuvenCILS data are used. The project focuses specifically on therole of the school level context in explaining the ethnic gap in educational achievement. While in the past some research has been carried out on the influence of school size, sector (private/public) and ethnic and socio-economic composition, findings are often contradictory and little is known about relevant processes connecting school factors to individual outcomes. CILS4EU and LeuvenCILS panel data allows to find out how various processes at the individual, class group and school level channel or adjust the effect of these classical school characteristics on the development of schooling paths. Furthermore, we will look at the influence and interplay of teachers, school teams and principal characteristics which have scarcely been considered in large-scale quantitative research. The fact that the comparative data from the CILS4EU project is used (including information from the Netherlands, Sweden, England and Germany) enables me to go beyond the Flemish case and investigate differences between educational systems and their relation to the gap in school achievement between native and immigrant children. Specific attention will be paid to school trajectories of children of Turkish immigrants, which are present in all these countries." "The “Revolution” of Chinese Buddhism of the Mao Era: A Study of the Monastic Life on Mt. Jiuhua (1949–1978)" "Ann Heirman" "Department of Languages and Cultures" "The proposed project focuses on Chinese Buddhism on Mt. Jiuhua in the Mao era (1949–1978), especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when the persecution of Buddhism was in full swing. Mt. Jiuhua located in Qingyang County, Anhui Province, has been identified as the abode of Dizang Bodhisattva since the late Ming period. Primarily using access-restricted archives that I have gathered in Qingyang, this project serves as a case study to examine the dramatic destruction and transformation of Chinese Buddhism. This project sheds light on the complicated relationship between religion and state and also contributes to our understanding of the strategies and tactics of the weak to survive under oppressive regimes. My research examines four interrelated aspects of Buddhism on Mt. Jiuhua under Maoism and aims to produce four peer-reviewed papers. First, based on the activities of an elite Buddhist, Yifang (1914–1959), it addresses how progressive Buddhists like Yifang were educated to support the new socialist regime. Second, it examines the mobilization of Jiuhua Buddhists to participate in land reforms and the fundamental shift of their economic basics. Third, it investigates the reorientation of Jiuhua Buddhism on a global scale through Buddhist diplomacy and the reception of overseas pilgrims. Fourth, it focuses on the material devastation that happened to Jiuhua Buddhism during the Cultural Revolution, a tumultuous period of political chaos and violence." "The reversal of the gender imbalance in higher education: implications for patterns of assortative mating in Europe" "Jan Van Bavel" "Centre for Sociological Research" "This project will be pioneering the study of demographic consequences of a major recent development in Europe: while men have always received more education than women in the past, this gender imbalance in education has now turned around. Today, women excel men in terms of participation and success in higher education. This implies that, for the first time in history, there are more highly educated women than men reaching the reproductive ages and looking for a partner. I expect that this will have profound consequences for the demography of reproduction in Europe because mating practices have always implied that men are the majority in higher education. Women tend to prefer partners who are at least as highly educated as themselves, while men tend to choose partners who are at most equally educated. This traditional pattern is no longer compatible with the new gender distribution in higher education. This project will address the implications of this new situation for age-old patterns of partnership formation. Mating patterns and reproduction are crucial for understanding the reproduction of social inequality: “like marries like” in terms of socio-economic status implies that social inequality is enhanced through partner selection because advantageous and disadvantageous economic and cultural resources of two individuals and families are pooled."