He obtained his PhD at Utrecht University (1988) and was a post-doc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Education and Human Development in Berlin (1988-1989).
[3] For Bourdieu, the effect of families’ social origin on educational attainment is dependent on economic capital and increasingly on cultural resources of privileged parents.
[10][11] De Graaf and colleagues compared the DRM model with the conventional ones, and found it superior,[9][12] and had applied DRMs to estimate the impact of: (1) intergenerational class mobility on political preferences;[13][14][15] (2) intra- and inter-generational social mobility on happiness;[16] (3) the education of husband and wife on cultural consumption;[12][17][18] (4) class of wife and husband on their political preference[19] and their class identity;[20] (5) the impact of the education of husband and wife;[21] (6) intergenerational educational mobility on health;[22] De Graaf maintains that despite secularisation, religion is still a central element of modern life.
[24][25] De Graaf and colleagues have also shown that the state can accelerate the secular transition[26] and, using Dutch event history data, that people are more likely to leave faith when they are in their late teens.
Ruiter and De Graaf show that members of volunteering organisations are more likely to start new jobs which are better in terms of status and earnings than those of non-members.
[8] In another study, Ruiter and De Graaf confirmed that frequent churchgoers are more active in volunteer work and discovered that a devout national context has an additional positive effect.
The book makes the case for progress and cumulative growth in sociological knowledge by emphasising a common core of basic methodological standards for theoretical and empirical work.
The handbook sketches basic features of rigorous sociology related to theory construction, empirical research, methods, and contributions to policy-making.
The problems can often be traced back to actions that are perfectly rational or well-intended from an individual perspective, but that, taken together, give rise to undesirable societal outcomes.
In 2013, together with Geoffrey Evans, De Graaf edited "Political Choice Matters: Explaining the strength of class and religious cleavages in cross-national perspective".
[42] The volume investigates the role of ideological positions adopted by political parties in shaping the extent of class and religious voting in contemporary democracies.
Combining over-time, cross-national data and multi-level research designs, it demonstrates that parties' programmatic positions can provide voters with choice sets that accentuate or diminish political cleavages.
It also simultaneously tests alternative, ‘bottom up’, approaches that attribute changes in class and religious voting to individualisation processes associated with socio-economic development and secularisation.