Chip Huisman

Chip Huisman joined the ASSR September 2007. Before starting at the ASSR Chip taught courses on classical and contemporary sociological theory and statistical research methods at the sociology and anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam and was a junior researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced labour Studies (AIAS). Before his academic career Chip was for over five years active as a drug and alcohol educator at an addiction treatment center and used to work at the IMC Weekendschool in Amsterdam. Chip has a BA in Social Work (Hogeschool de Horst 2003) and a MA in Sociology (University of Amsterdam 2006).

Chip’s PhD project asks the question how drug use is spread across social networks in schools, and whether this process varies across secondary school types and children of different social origins. Empirically, this project will combine three different methods. First, ethnographic data will be gathered on pupils within two different school types. Second, network data will be gathered on the detailed diffusion process of one type of drug use in two schools. Third, based on diffusion models analyzed with these data, hypotheses on substance use among children of different school types and social origins can be formulated and tested using existing large-scale school surveys without network data. This way, Chip will bridge two angles within analytical sociology, one that sees interactional data as essential to any sociological study and one that employs large-scale nationally representative survey data to test hypotheses.