Pearl Dykstra

She holds the position of Professor of Empirical Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She was the Deputy Chair (2016-2020) of the High Level Group of scientists advising the Cabinet of European Commissioners. She is a member of the Board of the Social Sciences and Humanities Division of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. She is also an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She serves as Scientific Director of ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economics Innovations.

A recurring theme in Dykstra's research is that legal regulations and policy provisions around families are not neutral. They create dependencies that restrict people's autonomy, can facilitate the choice to enter into intergenerational obligations, but can also promote economic independence through participation in the labor market. International comparative research (Hagestad & Dykstra, 2016; Dykstra, 2018) shows that women rather than men opt for financial compensation, just as women with few professional perspectives make that choice sooner than women with broad professional perspectives.

In research and policy circles, issues concerning young and old are usually studied and discussed separately from each other. In her work, Dykstra has shown the importance of moving beyond this distinction, as it not only ignores similarities between young and old but also ignores intergenerational dependencies. Her approach, which takes into account several family generations, has generated new research questions, such as those about the role of grandparenthood in retirement decisions and the availability of help from grandparents in decisions about children (Dykstra & Komter, 2012).

She served as Vice-President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) from 2011-2016. She is an elected member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) since 2005. She was an elected member of the Dutch Social Sciences Council (SWR) from 2006-2016. In 2009 she was a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Studies (NIAS). In 2010 she was elected as fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, and in 2016 she was elected as member of Academia Europaea, the pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. In 2018, she was elected Member of the Governing Board of the International Science Council

Dykstra's research is among the first to recognize the complexity in adult parent-child relationships, as reflected in configurations of support and conflicting emotions. In joint collaborations, she has developed a typological approach to obtain a nuanced picture of the way generational dependencies arise within families. Such an approach does not assume that dimensions such as exchanges of support, conflicts and emotions are additive or can be traced back to a single construct. Van Gaalen and Dykstra (2006), for example, reveal that - contrary to the usual view that solidarity and conflict are opposites - conflicts sometimes go hand in hand with intense exchanges of material support ('ambivalent relationships'), and in other cases go hand in hand with an absence of meaningful interactions ('discordant relationships').

Dykstra’s research has been supported by numerous grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the European Research Council. She acquired funding for a number of large-scale projects, such as the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NWO Large Investments 2002-2014), EU 7th framework programs MULTILINKS (2008-2011), Changing Families and Sustainable Societies (2013-2017), and Families In Context (ERC-Advanced Grant 2012).

After obtaining her PhD, Dykstra worked as a senior scientist at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), in The Hague. In 2000, while working at the NIDI, she also became a lecturer in Sociology and Social Gerontology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In the same year, she became the director of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study. From 2002-2009 she held the position of Professor in Kinship demography at Utrecht University. Pearl Dykstra was appointed chair of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2009, and held her inaugural speech in 2012.

Dykstra graduated from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with a BA degree in psychology in 1979. She completed her MA degree in psychology in 1982 at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoraal (graduate level, social psychology), from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 1985. She completed her training at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Social psychology in 1990. The title of her dissertation was: Next of (non)kin: The importance of primary relationships for older adults’ well-being.