Door Barbara Gouwenberg – uit de nieuwsbrief van de werkgroep Filantropische Studies aan de VU (december 2018) Het Centrum voor Filantropische Studies werkt momenteel met man en macht om de financiering voor het onderzoek Geven in Nederland voor de komende 6 jaar (3 edities) veilig te stellen.

As an open science enthusiast I try to lead by example – you will gather from my blog that I am an online activist when it comes to the incentives in academia and the evaluation of research careers. Last Wednesday I took a few minutes to create a poster for an online campaign to encourage researchers to cite the data they have collected or other data they are using.

In the prehistoric era of competitive science, researchers were like magicians: they earned a reputation for tricks that nobody could repeat and shared their secrets only with trusted disciples.

Gordon Feld posted a comparison of results from a repeated measures ANOVA with paired samples t-tests. Using Stata, I wondered how these results would look in a regression framework. For those of you who want to replicate this: I used the data provided by Gordon. The do-file is here.

“What do people misunderstand about your research?” A great question that allows me to correct a few popular ideas about our research on philanthropy. 1. Who pays you? The first misunderstanding is that charities pay for our research on philanthropy. We understand that you would think that, because for charitable organizations it is useful to know what makes people give. After all, they are in the business of fundraising.

The Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is looking for a professor in the area of charity lotteries. The professor is expected to conduct research on the relations between charity lotteries, nonprofit organizations, and the government.

By René Bekkers & Pamala Wiepking In decisions on academic careers, the societal impact that researchers have with their research is gaining importance. This is an addition to incentives for academic impact. Relevant indicators for academic impact are how often the researcher has been cited (the so-called H-index) and the impact factor (IF) of the journals in which the researcher has published.

Working with scholars from other disciplines can be a challenge.  The people you meet speak the same language, but the words they use sometimes mean different things. It takes time to learn the vocabulary, even though you know the words. Like the song: I’m an alien.

Public debates on philanthropy link charitable giving to wealth. In the media we hear a lot about the giving behavior of billionaires – about the giving pledge, the charitable foundations of the wealthy, how the causes they support align their business interests, and how they relate to government programs. Yes – the billions of tech giants go a long way. Imagine a world without support from foundations created by wealthy.

The board of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has appointed me as Full Professor of Philanthropy at the Department of Sociology. I will continue my research on prosocial behavior, charitable giving, volunteering and blood donation. I will give a ceremonial inaugural lecture on July 12, 2018, at the 13th ISTR Conference in Amsterdam.

What can we learn from the drop in donations to Oxfam after the child abuse news broke? In the UK, about 7,000 donors cancelled, in the Netherlands 1,700, and in Hong Kong 715. First, the drop does not tell us much about what makes people give. Most donors have continued to give. The 7,000 who cancelled in the UK represent 3.5% of income in the UK. The 1,700 donors who cancelled in the Netherlands are 0.5% of all donors.