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The Socially Excluded in the Netherlands: The Development of an Overall Index

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the measurement of social exclusion. As an illustration, we investigate how many people are socially excluded in the Netherlands. The study also inquired about whether social exclusion is correlated with certain background characteristics, such as gender, age, ethnicity and income. We develop an index based on 42 indicators ranging over four dimensions: (1) participation; (2) material deprivation; (3) access to basic rights; and (4) value orientations. The four dimensions were captured by the Dutch 2010 EU-SILC, in which a specific module on social exclusion was added (n = 10,124). A total of 4.2 % of the adult population show very low scores on at least two of the four dimensions, and thus can be considered socially excluded.

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Notes

  1. Note that no interactions between background variables were included in the models. First of all, there were no a priori and theoretically based hypotheses about any interactions. Second, out of all 15 potential interactions only one appeared to be significant. This may be coincidence. Third, the effect of most significant interactions per dimension, as expressed by the odds ratios, varied from 0.9 to 1.1 and is almost nil. Finally, the few interactions that had some effect showed little consistency in their direction within and between the dimensions, and were therefore hard to interpret.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Socio-Economic and Spatial Statistics, Statistics Netherlands, P.O. Box 4481, 6401 CZ, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Moniek Coumans & Hans Schmeets

  2. Faculty of Art and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Hans Schmeets

Authors
  1. Moniek Coumans
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  2. Hans Schmeets
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Correspondence to Moniek Coumans.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics of the social exclusion items
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Appendix 2

See Table 5.

Table 5 Solutions PCA per dimension
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Coumans, M., Schmeets, H. The Socially Excluded in the Netherlands: The Development of an Overall Index. Soc Indic Res 122, 779–805 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0707-6

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