Manfred te Grotenhuis | Radboud University Nijmegen (original) (raw)

Papers by Manfred te Grotenhuis

American Journal of Sociology

In Suicide, Durkheim found that involvement in religious communities is inversely related to suic... more In Suicide, Durkheim found that involvement in religious communities is inversely related to suicide risk. In this article, two explanations for this relationship are examined. One is that religious networks provide support. The other is that religious communities prohibit suicide. To examine these hypotheses, individual-level data on suicide in the Netherlands from 1936 to 1973 are used. The results show that with an increase in the proportion of religious persons in a municipality, the chances of committing suicide decrease for every denomination in that municipality, as well as among nonchurch members. Furthermore, along with the secularization of Dutch society, the impact of religious composition on suicide wanes. These results contradict the network-support mechanism and confirm the notion that religious communities have a general protective effect against suicide.

If your regression model contains a categorical predictor variable, you commonly test the signifi... more If your regression model contains a categorical predictor variable, you commonly test the significance of its categories against a preselected reference category. If all categories have (roughly) the same number of observations, you can also test all categories against the grand mean using effect (ANOVA) coding. In observational studies, however, the number of observations per category typically varies. This paper shows how all categories can be tested against the sample mean. The paper explains the procedure, called weighted effect coding, using R, SPSS, and Stata on the accompanying website.
A follow-up Hints & Kinks expands the procedure to regression models that test interaction effects. The authors show that, within this framework, the weighted effect coded interaction displays the extra effect on top of the main effect found in a model without the interaction effect. This offers a promising new route to estimate interaction effects in observational data, where different category sizes often prevail. Software (R, SPSS, and Stata) to run these novel regression models is also available at the authors’ website.

Journal For the Scientific Study of Religion, 2008

... Traditional Christian Belief and Belief in the Supernatural: Diverging Trends in the Netherla... more ... Traditional Christian Belief and Belief in the Supernatural: Diverging Trends in the Netherlands Between 1979 and 2005? NAN DIRK DE GRAAF 1 ,; MANFRED TE GROTENHUIS 2. Article first published online: 4 NOV 2008. ... Traditional Christian Belief. ...

The relation between religiosity and donations to charity has frequently been subject of research... more The relation between religiosity and donations to charity has frequently been subject of research. We analyzed effects of dimensions of individual religiosity (Glock and Stark 1966) on people's intention to donate to the poorest countries. We tested for cross-national effect differences in representative samples of seven European coun- tries. Results turned out to be relatively robust across countries. We found

Psychiatric services (Washington, D.C.), 2005

Psychiatric Services, 2005

Mental health services appear increasingly incapable of satisfying the demand for care, which may... more Mental health services appear increasingly incapable of satisfying the demand for care, which may cause some segments of the population to be less effectively reached. This study investigated the rates of use of mental health services in the Netherlands from 1979 to 1995 and examined whether particular sociodemographic groups made greater or lesser relative use of these services over time. Data were derived from the Facilities Use Surveys, a series of Dutch cross-sectional population studies that have recorded household characteristics and service use since 1979. More than 28,000 households were included in the analyses. The overall use of mental health services virtually doubled from 1979 to 1995; a particularly steep rise was seen in the first half of the 1980s. Households that had one parent, that had low income, that were dependent on benefits, and that were younger all had greater odds of using both specialized mental health care (for example, prevention programs for mental health problems and psychotherapeutic and social psychiatric treatment offered by psychologists, psychotherapists, or psychiatrists) and social work services (for example, psychosocial counselling and practical support offered by social workers to people with social problems, such as housing, finances, and psychosocial issues). Households with low education were less likely to use specialized mental health care but were more likely to use social work services. Nonreligious households and urban households were more likely to use specialized mental health care and were equally likely to use social work services. Overall, these relative use patterns did not change over time. Despite greater pressures on mental health services and the many changes in service delivery in recent decades, relative patterns of help seeking and referral to mental health services have not varied systematically over time.

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2008

International Journal of Epidemiology, 2011

European Sociological Review, 2005

The present study aims to answer research questions on people's willingness to donate money to he... more The present study aims to answer research questions on people's willingness to donate money to help alleviate poverty. First, what are the individual (or micro) determinants and state-level (macro) determinants of welfare states that influence people's willingness to donate money to the poor? Second, to what extent do individual determinants for donating money to the poor interact with state-level determinants? To answer these two questions, the 1993 Eurobarometer survey is used, containing relevant data on nearly 14,000 inhabitants from 15 European countries. Hypotheses are tested using logistic multi-level analyses. The results show that religion, economic situation, political stances and types of welfare regimes influence people's willingness to help the poor. Interestingly, education and living conditions interact with types of welfare regimes.

European Societies, 2002

We set out to describe and explain differences in the amount of some dimensions of social capital... more We set out to describe and explain differences in the amount of some dimensions of social capital within and between European societies. Social capital refers to a wide range of social phenomena; however, we focus on social contacts with family and friends. We derive hypotheses about cross-national differences in social capital from theories on the nature of welfare state regimes. We test these hypotheses with multi-level analyses on Eurobarometer data, collected in thirteen countries. We nd signi cant variance across different countries. This variance is partly explained by individual characteristics: religious people and people living in medium-sized or rural towns have more social contacts. Moreover, we nd quite differential effects of other individual characteristics on social contacts and no effects of political stances. Differences in the crossnational compositions in educational attainment and household size also account for the variance in social contacts. Finally, people living in socialdemocratic regimes turn out to have the smallest amount of social contacts, whereas people living in the Latin Rim have the largest amount. In between, we nd people living in liberal, respectively, conservative-corporatist regimes. This explanation is opposed to the hypothesis that it is the difference in social security rates that causes differences in social capital.

Religion is gradually losing its influence in Dutch society, which is one aspect of 'secularizati... more Religion is gradually losing its influence in Dutch society, which is one aspect of 'secularization'. In this study we focus on individual secularization, namely the increasing number of non-religious people in the Netherlands. More specifically, traditional Christian faith and belief in the supernatural are examined. First, the trends in these forms of belief are described for the period 1979-2000. Second, explanations for the trends are formulated and tested using OLS regression analyses accompanied by a simulation technique. During the 1979-2000 period, both traditional Christian faith and belief in the supernatural declined. The decline of Christian belief and belief in the supernatural is mainly caused by compositional effects, namely the slow but continuous replacement of older religious cohorts by younger non-religious cohorts. 2005, jaargang 80, nr. 2