Böcker i Netherlands Institute for Social Research-serien

The Dutch government wishes to promote the social acceptance of homosexuality. This report shows that the Netherlands is still the most gay-tolerant country in Europe. Nonetheless, there are limits to that tolerance and there are some groups in Dutch society that clearly have more difficulty with homosexuality than others.

How is the Dutch population faring? That is the central question addressed in The Social State of the Netherlands 2009. This book describes the present status of the Netherlands and the Dutch in a number of key areas of life, and also highlights the changes that have taken place in people's life situation over the last ten years.

The relationship between survey design and the quality of survey data is the central focus of this book. With regard to data quality, the emphasis is on two aspects that seem to be the most relevant in this context: accuracy and comparability. For accuracy, we mainly focus on representativeness, or how well the population under study is represented by the respondents of a survey, as well as measurement, i.e., how the way in which data is collected from respondents might affect the responses they give. The focus in regards to comparability is on the comparability of data collected from different minority groups. The data is drawn from several large-scale surveys conducted among non-Western minorities in The Netherlands. Attention is also paid to the costs of surveys among non-Western minorities.

In recent years, ethnic residential concentration and negative consequences in ethnic minority neighbourhoods have increased. This volume presents scientific knowledge and contributes to the societal debate by studying the effects of ethnic residential concentration on ethnic minoritiesAE social contacts and language practices.

Examines the performance of the public sector of twenty-eight OECD countries between 1995 and 2009. Outcomes in the fields of education, health, housing, and safety are related to the amount of public spending. Special attention is paid to the viewpoint of the individual citizen.