Abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to describe and explain individual and contextual variation in educational attainment and religiosity of second-generation Turkish and Moroccan Muslims in North-West Europe. The two minority groups are compared across local and national receiving contexts in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden to answer two
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overarching research questions: (i) when and why are ethnicity and religiosity a resource or a hindrance in the educational attainment of second-generation Muslims; and (ii) when and why is religiosity a bridge or a barrier in their acculturation and in intergroup relations with the wider society? A first part addresses the role of ethnicity and religiosity in second-generation attainment. Extending comparative stratification research to ethnic minorities, two studies focus on local co-ethnic communities as a possible source of ethnic social capital enabling second-generation attainment. The first study reveals small yet robust positive effects of ‘ethnic density’, or the presence of co-ethnic neighbours, on school completion among the second generation. The second study analyses the interplay of ethnic density with neighbourhood structure and finds that positive ‘ethnic density’ effects on school completion were cancelled out or even reversed in poor-quality neighbourhoods. A third study takes an approach from institutional opportunity structures and compares education and religiosity of second-generation Muslims across four countries which differ in the public accommodation of Islam. Higher levels of religiosity were found to be coupled with educational disadvantage in Germany; but they were decoupled from education in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. A second part addresses religiosity in the acculturation and intergroup relations of second-generation Muslims. A study among Turkish- and Moroccan-Belgians asks how religion is transmitted from one generation to the next in the context of acculturation. The findings show that the intergenerational transmission process is fully mediated by individual orientations towards heritage culture maintenance. The final two studies on religion as a social identity extend an explanatory approach from ‘identity threat’ in intergroup relations to the ‘threatened’ religious identity of second-generation Muslims. Replicating processes of religious identification and politicisation across nine local intergroup contexts in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden, I find that conflict between religious and civic identities is explained by dual pathways from perceived discrimination towards religious identification and civic dis-identification. The concept ‘politicised identity’ is refined in the last study by showing that distinct forms of politicised identity are associated with opposite pathways from perceived discrimination towards either politicisation or de-politicisation. In conclusion, and keeping in mind inherent limitations in cross-sectional data, this dissertation contributes to the sociology of migration by showing that ethnicity and religiosity can be a resource or a hindrance in second-generation attainment depending on structural and institutional conditions in local and national receiving contexts. The dissertation also contributes to research on acculturation and intergroup relations in social and cultural psychology by addressing an under-researched religious dimension of acculturation and identification processes; and by identifying more or less cohesive ethnic communities and more or less threatening interethnic relations as critical contextual factors in these processes
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