{"id":96079,"date":"2019-03-13T15:52:56","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T14:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=96079"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:23:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:23:13","slug":"publishing-is-not-what-science-is-all-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2019\/03\/13\/publishing-is-not-what-science-is-all-about\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Publishing is not what science is all about\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can you say anything about the importance of family if you don\u2019t know anything about the role played by non-kin? Nina Conkova, who lives far away from her family herself, was so fascinated by this question that she wrote an entire PhD dissertation about it: Non-Kin Ties as a Source of Support in Europe: On the Role of Context<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\n\n<\/svg>\n<\/span>\n\tImage by:<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLevien Willemse<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>

How do you explain at family get-togethers what your doctoral research was about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI always lead off with the following question: \u2018How many friends, neighbours and acquaintances do you yourself have? What do you do for each other, when do you do it, and why?\u2019 That was what my research was about, but I didn\u2019t focus on you and me, but rather on all of us in Europe. In addition, I looked into the differences between the various European countries, and the causes of these differences, focusing on cultural and social differences and migration.\u201d<\/p>\n

What was the main conclusion you drew after conducting your research?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIn most countries, family members are the most important source of support, and professionals the least important one, with non-kin ranking somewhere in between. This hierarchy is different for each country, type of help and type of household, and the differences in ranking are due to cultural differences, such as commonly held beliefs on who is supposed to look after family members.<\/p>\n

\u201cLiterature on the subject often supposes that there is a major difference between Northwest Europe and Southeast Europe when it comes to receiving support from your relatives. It is commonly believed that people in Southeast Europe put a greater premium on family and that, as a result, people there receive less help from non-kin than people living in Northwest Europe. My conclusion was that these things differ from country to country, but not from European region to European region. For instance, I found the highest levels of emotional support by non-kin in Austria, Denmark and Norway, but also in Italy. When it comes to finding a job, Maltese and Romanians mainly look to their relatives, while people in Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Sweden depend first and foremost on non-kin.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did you come up with this subject?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe \u2018Families in Context\u2019 research group told me I was free to come up with a subject of my own choosing as long as it involved a comparison between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, since I originally hail from Bulgaria myself. I wanted to research non-kin, because without that kind of research, you can\u2019t say much about the importance of family. I also partly chose this subject because I find it interesting on a personal level to see what happens to your network when you\u2019re a migrant. I expected non-kin to become more important, and this turned out to be true. For instance, my final chapter, on Polish migrants, shows that if you\u2019re a woman and highly educated, you are very likely to end up in a network of people like that. Which was also true for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

You stated in your acknowledgements section that your partner warned you, telling you that getting a PhD would be like waging a war. Was it really that bad?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNo, not at all. I had some ups and downs. Sometimes I felt good, when I had just had an article published, and sometimes I felt less good, when I had just had something rejected. Looking back, I really enjoyed doing it. The early stages were the hardest for me, because I was trained to conduct qualitative research, whereas my study was largely quantitative. But thankfully, I ended up being fine with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the propositions you submitted along with your dissertation was that publishing should be a way to conduct science, rather than the objective. Can you tell us a bit more about that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cPublishing is not what science is all about. When you\u2019re doing a PhD, you\u2019re under so much pressure to publish that you don\u2019t have time to consider the message of your work and whether it\u2019s important or interesting. In a perfect world, you\u2019ll have four articles published, which can make the job a bit of an ordeal. By the way, that is not just true for the Netherlands. The idea behind all this publishing is that the impact of your dissertation can be measured in this way, even though it may actually have the opposite effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s on the cover?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSomething I painted myself. I\u2019m very proud of that. I used to draw a lot, but I didn\u2019t have much time to do so while conducting my doctoral research. It\u2019s a plant my partner gave me, a Jatropha. <\/em>The plant more or less hibernates, during which time it\u2019s nothing but a trunk. To me, it symbolises family \u2013 something that is always there. In summer it gets leaves and flowers, which to me represent social networks. Life is less fun without them. The same is true for the plant.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t

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