Dr Robert de Vries

Dr Robert de Vries is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research and also part of Kent's Q-Step centre.

He received his PhD in Medical Sociology from Imperial College London in 2012 and subsequently pursued a post-doctoral sociology fellowship at the University of Oxford. 

Dr de Vries has a wide variety of research interests, including social stratification and social comparisons, cultural consumption, health inequalities, and social attitudes and stereotypes (particularly as regards welfare benefit claimants). His main current research areas include: 

• the social patterning of cultural consumption 
  
• attitudes towards welfare benefit claimants in the UK
  
• the impact of social comparisons on wellbeing. 

He has previously conducted research into the effects of income inequality on health and personality and on the social determinants of health among older people.  

Dr de Vries is a senior member of the Kent Q-Step Centre and primarily teaches quantitative methods at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He also undertakes substantive teaching in the areas of inequality and social stratification.  

Dr de Vries is available to supervise PhD or Master's students wishing to research any of the topics listed in my research interests. In addition, he is able and willing supervise projects involving 'research about research' (such as research on publication bias, the replication crisis, and questionable research practices. He can also supervise projects relating to the use of quantitative evidence in the media.

Media

• Yes, peer review sucks. But attention-economy hellscapes would be worse
• Why do people care more about benefit 'scroungers' than billions lost to the rich?
• What do you get if you don't teach stats properly? Farage and Trump
• How our unconscious minds are prejudiced against benefit claimants
• The Guardian - Benefit claimants are now seen as other - less than fully human 
• The Conversation - When ‘exciting’ trumps ‘honest’, traditional academic journals encourage bad science 
  
• Benefit claimants: stereotypes and implicit attitudes - A Think Kent lecture video 2016 (YouTube)