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Said Hassan and Kasimir Dederichs, Nuffield Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellows, have been awarded first and second ECSR Prize for best PhD thesis, respectively, for their Nuffield College DPhil theses.

The ECSR awarded the prizes at their annual conference, which took place at the University of Cologne between the 3rd and 5th of September.

Said Hassan's DPhil thesis, "Residential Segregation, School Contexts, and Educational Inequalities", which won first prize, explores how schools contribute to preexisting learning inequalities along socioeconomic and ethnic lines. 

Building on this, the thesis makes three key contributions to the wider sociological debate on education: it introduces a new theoretical model that reconciles conflicting findings in the literature by incorporating both quantitative and qualitative school effects; it uses natural experiments to provide causal evidence on how school and teacher quality affect student outcomes; and it empirically tests mechanisms such as parental sorting, teacher exposure, and assimilation processes to better understand how schools can either reinforce or reduce educational disparities.

Said Hassan commented: "I am very honoured to receive the ECSR Best PhD Thesis Prize. I owe a great deal to my supervisors, Richard Breen and David Kirk, to my peers and colleagues, and to the supportive research environment at Nuffield College, which has profoundly shaped my work and my thinking about social stratification research."

Kasimir Dederichs' thesis, "Who (else) is Involved? - How Voluntary Associations Connect and Separate Us", which grabbed second prize, addresses the question in how far voluntary associations, such as sports clubs, cultural organisations, and hobby groups, can foster social cohesion by facilitating contact between individuals from different walks of life.

Challenging the common assumption that voluntary associations are inherently integrative, the thesis develops a framework, ‘front door’, ‘indoors’, and ‘backdoor’, to analyse how individuals enter, experience, and exit these groups, revealing how homophily and cultural norms drive segregation across gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, and age. Through four empirical studies based on data from Germany and the Netherlands, Dederichs shows that voluntary associations often reinforce social boundaries rather than bridge them, offering a nuanced understanding of civic life and its role in either connecting or separating us.

Kasimir Dederichs said: “I feel honoured to receive the second place in the ECSR best thesis award and am grateful to my supervisor, Nan Dirk de Graaf and my co-authors Dingeman Wiertz and Hanno Kruse. It was a nice coincidence that this year's ECSR conference - and thus the award ceremony - took place in Cologne (Germany), which happens to be my hometown, where I also studied during my Bachelor's and Master's."

The European Consortium for Sociological Research, ECSR, is a non-profit, scientific, professional organization that promotes theoretically driven empirical research in Sociology. It awards a yearly prize for the best PhD thesis among candidates from the ECSR member institutes. For more information, visit the ECSR website.