Leading family sociologist Prof Renske Keizer, Erasmus University Rotterdam(EUR), has been awarded a Vici grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She receives 1.5 million euros for the project ‘Does parenting perpetuate social inequality? It's about time!’ which will be conducted among 200 parents in Rotterdam. By obtaining this grant, she has secured – an exceptional NWO trilogy, by being awarded a Vici after her Veni and Vidi.
Social inequality among children is growing. It is known that differences in parenting behaviour perpetuate this inequality, but we still know very little about why.
Renske Keizer: "I am thrilled to be awarded this grant because it allows me and my team to study how fathers and mothers deal with unexpected events in everyday life. "With this, I hope to discover new mechanisms associated with differences in how people can control time. This could tell us more about the ways in which social inequality and parenting behaviour are related." Dean Victor Bekkers: "I am very proud of our laureate, Renske Keizer. It is an incredible achievement to be awarded a Vici after previous grants from NWO and ERC. It will allow her to deepen our faculty's sociological research on family and social inequality further."
To answer the research questions, a 100-day diary study will be conducted among 200 parents in Rotterdam. These data will be linked to longitudinal data on their children's development and supplemented with in-depth interviews with fathers and mothers.
Vici is one of the most significant person-centred scientific grants in the Netherlands. Advanced researchers in the Netherlands can apply for it. The award offers laureates the opportunity to develop an innovative line of research and further develop their research group over the next five years.
About Renske Keizer
Prof Renske Keizer is Professor of Family Sociology at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Her research focuses on the role of family in the emergence and persistence of social inequality. Keizer's research intersects sociology, demography, developmental psychology, pedagogical sciences and epidemiology. Central to her work is the application of the theory-based life course approach to the behaviour and well-being of individuals, and (extended) families.
Keizer's research has previously been awarded a prestigious Starting grant from the ERC, and Veni, Vidi and ORA grants from NWO. Since 2019, she has been a member of the Young Academy, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2020, she won the Joannes Juda Groen Junior Prize (biennial) for excellent and innovative interdisciplinary research.
She was recently appointed chair of the science committee of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (NIDI-KNAW). She has a proven track record of significant contributions to policy debates and through several highly cited publications in leading journals.
Within EUR, Renske Keizer, together with Prof Loes Keijsers, is the quartermaster for the sector plans on the theme Resilience in Youth. Within Convergence, she is a member of the Management Team of Healthy Start, and part of the academic team of SPRING (Resilient Delta). Finally, Renske Keizer is the programme director of the international and interdisciplinary master's programme Social Inequalities.
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Marjolein Kooistra, communications ESSB, kooistra@essb.eur.nl | 0683676038