Chapter 1. Ethnicity and membership in Dutch amateur football 15 membership data of all registered amateur football clubs in Netherlands for ten playing seasons starting in 2005 and ending in 2015. These data provide a longitudinal overview of roughly 2.2 million memberships. In addition to individual club memberships, these data contained individual members’ gender, date of birth and address. To determine additional social characteristics of members, the membership data have been matched with data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Statistics Netherlands keeps extensive individual level data of the Dutch population on a very wide range of characteristics, such as ethnic background and income. By using the gender, date of birth and six-digit postal code of individual members provided by the Royal Dutch Football Association, around 94 percent of the roughly 2.2 million memberships in the original data set were successfully matched with individual data from the Statistics Netherlands. Consequently, this procedure has resulted in a highly comprehensive and anonymized dataset of members of Dutch voluntary football clubs and their characteristics between the years 2005 and 2015. More information on the management of these data can be found in Appendix B. Modifications and selections of the data prior to the empirical analyses are discussed in the respective four empirical chapters, of which an outline is presented below. 1.5 Outline of the study The remainder of this dissertation consists of four empirical chapters and a final chapter in which the main findings of the study are summarized and discussed. In the empirical chapters the main research question is broken down into four distinct research questions which build onto one another. In the first of these chapters, chapter 2, I will start with an exploration of the distribution of ethnic backgrounds in amateur football. While explorations in the past have indicated that citizens with migrants tend to be underrepresented in organized sports, very little is known of the actual ethnic compositions of member populations and how they have evolved over time. Yet this knowledge forms a crucial building block to gain a clearer picture of the way ethnic differentiation and club membership are interrelated. Consequently, in the next chapter I aim to answer the following research question: ‘To what extent is Dutch amateur football an ethnic reflection
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