One part of my research examines what the public thinks about migration, what the media writes about it, and how the two are connected. Another part of my research is about the relations between ethnic minority groups and how they perceive each other. Methodologically, I combine advanced survey analysis with computational social science methods. I practice Open Science by making the materials of my publications openly available and by contributing to collaborative work on the robustness of empirical findings.
At NIDI, I work in the Migration and Open Science Departments. Before that, I worked at Goethe University Frankfurt, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Cologne, where I did my PhD.
At the moment, I have two projects: Crossing Boundaries, funded by the Dutch Research Council, and Rethinking Social Cohesion in Ethnically Diverse Schools within the SOCION consortium.
My work has been published in journals like Social Forces, European Sociological Review, European Journal of Political Research, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and has been taken up by policy institutions and international news media. I am Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational Social Science.
My teaching materials on computational social science, panel data analysis, and multilevel modelling are openly available.
Research
Majority attitudes toward immigrants
I study how people view immigrants and refugees, which groups meet more opposition and why. A central interest is how such attitudes change over time and how they depend on the socio-political contexts, such as political elite discourses. I also examine how views on immigration differ between demographic and ideological groups and how they relate to political behavior.
Relations among minority groups
Intergroup attitudes are usually studied as something majorities hold about minorities. I study how minority groups view one another, for example how people with a migration background view immigration or attitudes toward Jews among Muslims, and which factors shape these views, such as religion, identities, and social networks. I am also interested in how minorities relate to the host society, for example in their trust in institutions.
Computational social science
In addition to survey-based studies, I use computational methods to study how migration and minorities are discussed in mass media, politics, and on social media. I am interested in what drives these debates, how they change over time, how they relate to individual attitudes, and how people react online to events such as terrorist attacks. This work combines large text corpora with methods such as machine learning and large language models.
Replication and robustness
In large collaborative studies, I examine how robust and reproducible findings in the social sciences are. These studies look at how much results depend on the analytical choices researchers make and what helps make research more reproducible.
A complete chronological list is on the publications page.
