C.G. van der Veer

The Myth of ‘Unemployable’ People: an evaluation of a new employment service for the ‘hard core’ unemployed

In an era characterised by vast unemployment it is widely believed that certain categories of people are essentially ‘unemployable’. In most Western European countries, for instance, immigrants and other minority groups are considered to belong to the ‘hard core’ unemployed. While standard methods of the employment service have largely failed in assisting such individuals, a new method has been developed in the Netherlands referred to as the ‘tailor-made’ method. This article summarises research findings on the characteristics and suitability of this method. The findings contradict the myth of the ‘unemployable’ people.

Attitudinal predictors of potential illegal cross-border migration

This paper reports on the relationship between attitudes toward illegal immigrants and illegal immigration, and peoples private behavioural intention to immigrate illegally into a foreign country. The research was carried out in 2005, in Bulgaria, a country with a net emigration rate, using a sample of 505 undergraduate Bulgarian students (22.5% male; M age = 23.3; SD = 4.8). A pool of 78 items assessed attitudes toward undocumented immigrants and evaluation of illegal migration. These two measures were used to predict potential undocumented immigration. Based on a factor analysis six subscales were identified and labelled: improvement of life, moral evaluation, courage to live, failure experienced in own country, expectations of benefits from illegal migration, and right to immigrate. Results of a multiple regression analysis explained 62 percent of the variance of the behavioural intention to migrate illegally into a foreign country. The analysis yielded the following factors: attitudes to improve life (β = 0.35), the moral evaluation of illegal immigrants (β = -0.26), expectancies of benefits (β = -0.19), the courage of migrants (β = 0.10), and seeing illegal immigration as a right (β = 0.09), These findings support the hypothesis that attitudes may predict potential behaviour, the strongest predictor for undocumented migration being the urge to improve life, and moral evaluation of migrants.

Being Human: Relationships and You. A Social Psychological Analysis

Knud S. Larsen Reidar Ommundsen Kees van der Veer It would be redundant to say that the world we live in is not perfect. Our social life is often plagued by prejudice and discrimination, our social contacts frequently end up in some form of aggression, different persons or groups constantly try to persuade us to do things that serve them and may end up being harmful for us. At a larger scale history tends to repeat itself and the atrocities of the past – wars, torture, terrorism and genocide, to name just a few of the most damaging – describe the society of today as they did in the last centuries. On the other hand we encounter in our daily lives instances of cooperation and altruism, we see some people sacrificing themselves for the good of others and, at a macro level, see how nations try to work together in order to fight worldwide threats like global warming. The social world we live in is definitively a world of contrasts. How can we explain this “diversity”? How to make sense of crime and also of heroism? How do we make sense of ourselves? These are all central questions for the discipline of social psychology. Answers for questions like the above and for many other similar interrogations are put forward in the book “Being Human: Relationships and You. A Social Psychological Analysis”. Aimed to be a useful resource for students and scholars in social psychology, and more broadly in psychology, this text will certainly be of interest for social scientists in general and for all readers concerned with the intricacies of our social and psychological life.

Developing and validating a cross-national cumulative scale measuring attitudes toward illegal immigrants

The article reports the results of a Mokken Scale Procedure (MSP) developing a hierarchical cross-national scale gauging attitudes toward illegal immigration, and a subsequent qualitative cross-national assessment of this scale. Responses to a 20-item Likert-type-scale were collected in two national representative surveys in the Netherlands and New Zealand. The MSP analysis yielded a cumulative scale with the same four items for each with an acceptable ‘scalability’ in both samples, of Hu2009>u2009.40. This cross-national four-item scale was evaluated by means of in-depth interviewing nine participants in the Netherlands and 15 participants in New Zealand. Analysis of the interviews shows that individually ranking the items of the scale is similar to the rank order generated by MSP, but the individual evaluation of the degree of negativity of items strongly depends on the way illegal immigrants are framed by subjects. The contribution of a mixed methods approach is discussed. It is suggested that the present quantitative measuring instruments measure a general average attitude, which may be likened to a measure of the average temperature of a country at a certain moment, while qualitative evaluations vary with the way illegal immigrants are framed by individuals, like variations in local temperature