Maaike Jappens

I am a post-doctoral researcher and guest professor at the Department of Sociology at the VUB, interested in social inequality, children’s perceptions of the social world and their relationships with family and peers. My doctoral research focused on the often-overlooked relationship between grandparents and grandchildren and particularly the role of grandparenthood in divorced families. After that, I started working on the project “Socializing Inequality”, in which we explore when in their socio-cognitive development young children first become aware of inequalities in social status and how this awareness shapes the way they come to perceive and judge the world. Currently, I am the coordinator of the interdisciplinary FWO-SBO research project ‘Primary Prejudice’ which aims to broaden our understanding of bullying in Flemish (pre-)primary schools.

Research projects:

Primary Prejudice
Socializing Inequality

Research keywords:

children, socialization, classification, social status, bullying, grandparents