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groups now and ten years ago. The conclusion has to be more pessimistic if we
make a comparison between minority groups and indigenous Dutch. The gap that
existed in different areas of social life (education, labour, income) has not decreased
in the last ten years, on the contrary in some areas the gap has even widened. The
main reason for this is that the improvement of the socio-economic position of the
minorities did not keep pace with the improvement of the socio-economic position of
the Dutch population. There is one exception to this. The gap between minorities and
the Dutch narrowed as far as housing is concerned. This is noteworthy, since in the
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Netherlands this area of social life is heavily influenced by the government. This is at
least an indication that government policy mitigates market forces and leads to a
distribution which is fairer as far as the socially disadvantaged are concerned.
5. T&E: Criticism and comments
Although the T&E report system has its merits, it also has its limitations. A first
objection against T&E is an ideological one concerning the notion of equivalency.
The assumption which hides behind the notion of equivalency is that the behaviour of
the `average' Dutch population is taken as the standard for the behaviour of the
members of minority groups. The opinion of minorities does not seem to matter. A
subjective test on equivalency, in which the needs, wishes and necessities of the
minorities are considered does not exist.
To a certain extent we agree with this kind of criticism. It is especially valid as far as
the descriptive studies are concerned. But here we would also like to stress that in
our descriptive studies we only use the notion of equivalency as a first test - without
any normative implications and being very aware of the limitations of the notion of
equivalency. The objection of ethnocentrism is not valid, or to a much lesser extent,
for the analytical studies. In these studies we explicitly include cultural factors in our
analysis and try to determine to what extent they contribute to the explanation
whether equivalency is realised or not. We therefore strongly disagree with the critics
who state that we do not ke into consideration any differences in culturally based
wishes and aspirations between minorities and native Dutch.
A second main objection concerns the comparison of ethnic minorities and a
reference group of native Dutch. A point that has been made is that one is never
sure if one selects the right characteristics when defining the reference group. First of
all we would like to emphasize the importance of the comparison of a reference
group and the ethnic minority group. It is our expercience that the results are much
more convincing in discussions with policy makers and public opinion than without
the aforementioned comparison. Secondly, we do not randomly choose the
characteristics of the reference group. For example, if we want to study the labour
market position we do not include the brand of someone's trousers into the analysis.
The selection of characteristics is based on the study of relevant findings in research
publications. On the basis of these findings, we consider for example age,
occupational experience, gender, language proficiency, duration of stay in Holland,
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educational achievements to be relevant characteristics if we want to find out
whether or not labour market equivalency is realized.
APPENDIX II
In theory there are different methods to identify minority groups. Nationality is a
criterion, but in the Dutch context it is rather useless because of the fact that one
cannot identify Antilleans and most of the Surinamese with this criterion. In addition,
because of the increasing numbers of mediterrenean people who opt for Dutch
nationality this criterion will be no longer adequate to identify a major category of
these groups. The criterion country of birth of a person does not have this
disadvantage. It is especially suitable for identifying minorities who belong to the first
generation. The main drawback of this criterion is that it is not possible to identify
members of the second and third generation, i.e. persons who are born in the
Netherlands. If one wants to identify the second and third generation, one needs
information on the country of birth of the parents (second generation) and even the
country of birth of the grandparents if it concerns the third generation. The gathering
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