Over de zin van impact en het impact meten

How reliable is our knowledge on mechanisms that make people give? In a webinar organized by the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP) on December 10, 2024, I’ve given a preliminary answer to this question. The slides are here. With a group of scholars we seek to identify which results have successfully been replicated in research that was conducted since the 2007 Science of Generosity working paper (Bekkers &

Check out Detecting Bad Science, a new website I’ve created to help you identify weaknesses in empirical research reports. For each weakness you’ll find suggestions to avoid or repair it, or mitigate its consequences. The materials help you evaluate the quality of research in the social and behavioral sciences. You’ll also learn how to improve research designs and reports.

Looking back at my career thus far, I see four things that helped me advance in academia: freedom, help from others, coincidence, and quirkiness. Plus privilege, health, naive optimism, and openness.

It’s time for a career split: in the coming years, I am adding meta science and research integrity as a second line of research, next to the science of philanthropy. It’s a split, not a switch. I’m far from done with research on research on philanthropy and will keep working on it the Department of Sociology at VU Amsterdam.

Why is the share of income and wealth that people give to charities lower when their income and wealth are higher? Are more generous persons less likely to accumulate wealth? Or does wealth make people care less about those in need? Can fundraising organizations increase generosity by soliciting gifts in different ways? Fifteen years of data from the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey (Bekkers, De Wit &

Both in the Netherlands and in the USA, generosity has been declining in the past years. In the USA, the value of donations in 2023 declined by 2.1%, adjusted for inflation, according to recent findings from Giving USA. We found a similar decline in generosity in the Netherlands. The value of donations in 2022 reached an all-time low of 0.62% of GDP. The Netherlands gave about € 5.3 billion to charitable causes in the year 2022.

[Update 13 juni 2024: extra nuance toegevoegd; met dank aan Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm] De budgettaire bijlage bij het hoofdlijnenakkoord vermeldt op pagina 4 een bezuiniging op de giftenaftrek. SEO maakte onlangs een evaluatie van de giftenaftrek. Ik las de evaluatie in het licht van de bezuinigingsplannen. Hier een paar gedachten. Wat zegt de evaluatie van de giftenaftrek over het effect van afschaffing ervan? Helemaal niets. Huh?

Last week I attended a conference organized by the university libraries in the Netherlands with the straightforward title: “What do we want from publishers?” The conference served as a consultation with librarians and other academics, before the universities in the Netherlands start negotiations about deals with commercial publishers such as Elsevier.

Surprisingly little – at least to my taste. Science is supposed to be cumulative: we should build knowledge on solid foundations. But how do we know what knowledge is solid? Through independent verification. If someone claims to have found a regularity, it is only through repeated testing of the same claim that we know that the result holds in other populations and contexts. It turns out that scientists rarely conduct such replications.

Scientific research is based on data. How should researchers treat and document the data they analyze? Research Data Management policies recommend that data should be “as open as possible, and as closed as necessary”. What does that mean in practice? Only publish data you are allowed to publish . The “as open as possible” principle certainly does not mean that researchers should make all data they have public.