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Prof Dr. Sebastian Schnettler

Tanja Sluiter (secretary)

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Latest Publications

Schnettler S, Huinink J (2026): Refitting the Lower Decks of the Coleman Boat: A Biosocial and Evolutionary Expansion of the Standard Model of Sociological Explanation. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Online First.

van Dijk IK, Willführ KP (2026) Affected by many births, supported by many children? Later-life survival from a life course perspective in three historical populations.  The History of the Family, 1–18. doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2026.2660749

News

Latest news

Sebastian Schnettler: Press release "Interdisciplinarity provides impetus". Booster unit on the social dimension of hearing loss.

The UOL supports a total of eight booster units aimed at strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration. The ‘Methods’ working group is home to the HearingTogether booster unit, a co-operation with Christiane Thiel from the Department of Biological Psychology and Ulla Licandro from the Department of Special and Rehabilitation Education, as well as with the ‘Hearing4all’ cluster of excellence. This group focuses on the neural and social mechanisms at the interface between hearing loss and social relationships.

The UOL supports a total of eight booster units aimed at strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration. The ‘Methods’ working group is home to the HearingTogether booster unit, a co-operation with Christiane Thiel from the Department of Biological Psychology and Ulla Licandro from the Department of Special and Rehabilitation Education, as well as with the ‘Hearing4all’ cluster of excellence. This group focuses on the neural and social mechanisms at the interface between hearing loss and social relationships. Read the full details on all booster units here: https://uol.de/aktuelles/feature/interdisziplinaritaet-setzt-impulse.

Further information on the “HearingTogether” booster unit within the Methods Working Group can be found on the project website.

Cover of special issue: Schnettler & Huinink 2024

New Book Publication (Open Access)

S. Schnettler & J. Huinink (2024). Biosocial and evolutionary approaches in sociology. Special Issue, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpychologie. 

About the book: „After a long neglect of biosocial and evolutionary approaches to human behavior and sociality in sociology during much of the twentieth century, in recent years sociologists have started to re-engage with these topics in a variety of promising ways. It is our aim with this collection of about twenty peer-reviewed articles to exhibit the variety of approaches sociologists engage with, often in interdisciplinary collaborations. The special issue spans topics like biosociology, cultural evolution, evolutionary sociology, neurosociology, and sociogenomics. Works in all of these areas, for which we were able to win some of the experts in the respective fields, shows how biological, cultural, and social mechanisms interact in manifold and complex ways. With this exhibit of biosocial and evolutionary approaches in sociology we wish to inspire more sociologists to jump on board a much-needed interdisciplinary endeavor.”

All articles available open access via Journal Website

(Please note: currently, a wrong version of the cover circulates on some Springer pages. We hope the publisher can solve this issue shortly.)

 

New Book Publication

M. Hammerl, S. Schwarz & K. Willführ (2024): Evolutionary social sciences. A tour. Springer VS.

About the book: "The potential of Darwinian evolutionary theory has now been recognised in many social science disciplines, and this reception has often led to the development of new fields of research. For example, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary sociology or evolutionary demography have established themselves as independent disciplines and can be summarised as evolutionary social sciences. Selected concepts and fields of application of evolutionary social sciences are dealt with in this book. The reader is invited to take an interdisciplinary tour, which includes the disciplines of psychology, sociology, family science, behavioural genetics, demography, history, game theory and archaeology. The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains articles that provide a generally understandable introduction to the research fields and central concepts of evolutionary social sciences. The second part contains contributions that are dedicated to individual questions from an evolutionary perspective. The book is aimed at social scientists and students who wish to study the evolutionary perspective in the social sciences."

PDF version available via SpringerLink

Shinyapp

During his voluntary scientific year (2012-2022) at the Institute for Social Sciences of the University of Oldenburg, Felix Sajon developed the Shinyapp. The Shinyapp is a project that makes demographic data about the city of Oldenburg more accessible and make it easier to visualise it. Among other things, a comparison to European data should be made possible but also comparisons among city districts.

https://datatogo.shinyapps.io/website/

Further Achievements and Changes in 2022

We are proud to announce that in January of this year, Andreas Filser, doctoral student in our working group since 2016, successfully defended his dissertation on "Social consequences of imbalanced sex ratios" with "summa cum laude". Congratulations, Andreas! Andreas, in the meantime took on a postdoc at the Research Data Center of the Institute for Employment Research in Nürnberg. Also in the meantime, the working group succeeded in securing two additional grants: One is a research grant for the project "Establishing a health and contextual data inventory to facilitate interdisciplinary cross-border research" with Prof. Dr. Tobias Vogt and Prof. Dr. Viola Angelini at the University of Groningen. The project is funded with about 230.000 EUR and is part of the umbrella project "Comparison of healthcare structures, processes and outcomes in the Northern German and Dutch cross-border region II" with total funding of about 1.4m EUR, led by Prof. Dr. Lena Ansmann and Prof. Dr. Axel Hamprecht at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Oldenburg. Funded by this project, we welcome Sophie Stroisch to the working group who will work on her dissertation on "The importance of social and economic context factors for health differences in the Dutch-German border region". Also, in 2022 we were granted close to 119.000 EUR for the teaching project "Curated Methods Teaching for the Flipped Classroom of the 21st Century" from the German Foundation for Innovation in University Teaching. The project aims at innovating statistics and methods training in the social science by combining curated digital contents with project and research based in-classroom teaching. Furthermore, Felix Sajon joined our working group as part of his Voluntary Scientific Year. Currently he works on an interactive and comparative dashboard to illustrated recent demographic developments in the region for decision makers and stakeholders in the region.

New Publication

Filser A, Willführ KP (2022) Sex ratios and union formation in the historical population of the St. Lawrence Valley. PLOS ONE 17(6): e0268039. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268039

New Publication

Schnettler, Sebastian, and Anja Steinbach. 2022. “Is Adolescent Risk Behavior Associated with Cross-Household Family Complexity? An Analysis of Post-Separation Families in 42 Countries.” Frontiers in Sociology. 

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.802590/abstract

Start of DFG-Project "Kinship effects or affected kinship?"

On the September 15th 2021, the DFG-Project "Kinship effects or affected kinship? – Investigating the functioning of family networks by their impact on adult mortality and fertility" (WI 4666/2-1) has started.

In the planned research project, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, The Netherlands, and Sweden, the aim is to investigate functioning of family networks by estimating their effect on adult mortality and fertility using five different historical populations from Europe and North America. Click here to visit the project website.

New Publication

 

New Publication

Willführ, K. P., Eriksson, B., & Dribe, M. (2021). The impact of kin proximity on net marital fertility and maternal survival in Sweden 1900–1910—Evidence for cooperative breeding in a societal context of nuclear families, or just contextual correlations? American Journal of Human Biology, e23609. doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23609

 

(Changed: 24 Jun 2026)  |  Kurz-URL:Shortlink: https://uol.de/p50645n11872en
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