We are recruiting a PhD candidate to join our multidisciplinary team of experts for a project to improve the design and evaluation of lifestyle interventions by focusing on individuals’ specific needs and preferences in different phases of their life. While individual differences in circumstances and life goals are important for successful take-up and outcomes of lifestyle interventions, they are often not considered when designing and evaluating interventions. We aim to develop a generalized approach to systematically design and evaluate lifestyle interventions in accordance with individual differences and preferences. Such a systematic approach aims to increase the uptake of lifestyle interventions, especially among vulnerable groups, who have been proven hard to reach.
ProjectIn this project, you will develop a general framework that identifies 1) the barriers and facilitators for the uptake of individuals-based interventions, 2) predicts the uptake of lifestyle intervention across different subgroups, and 3) quantifies the effects on wellbeing of such interventions. The project consists of four stages:
- Based on a systematic literature review, you will develop a conceptual framework that describes how different factors in different groups influence the uptake of lifestyle interventions.
- By semi-structured interviews or focus groups barriers and facilitators will be explored in different groups of individuals.
- Elicitation of individual preferences for different types of interventions, using discrete choice experiments. This allows you to quantify the tradeoffs between different types of interventions, predict the uptake of different interventions across different types/groups of individuals, and quantify effects on welfare.
- Application of the framework on existing or ongoing interventions. By using observational data, such as population wide administrative data and cohort studies like the Rotterdam Study you will apply the developed framework to evaluate the uptake and health and wellbeing outcomes across different groups and provide recommendations to improve the design of ongoing interventions.
ALIVEThis project is part of the Flagship
ALIVE (A Life course and Individual-based View on Lifestyle to Enhance Health) which is funded through
Convergence, a collaboration between the Erasmus University, the Erasmus MC, and the TU Delft. As a member of this multidisciplinary project, you will collaborate with leading experts and fellow PhD students from all three institutions on a major research project focused on lifestyle interventions and their impact on health.
ALIVE is part of the Convergence theme Health & Technology. In Convergence, TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Erasmus MC have joined forces. The urgent and complex societal challenges of our time ask for fundamentally new forms of cooperation, whereby the boundaries between institutes and disciplines are crossed to create new perspectives and solutions. ALIVE is one of the ten Flagship funded within the Convergence theme of Health and Technology, in which we are creating new frameworks that promote scientific discoveries and technological innovation in the field of health and healthcare.
SupervisionYou will be supervised by Dr.
Bram Wouterse, associate professor at the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management, and Dr.
Dieuwke Schiphof, assistant professor at the Erasmus MC. You will be based at the
Health Economics research group at the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management. This group is nationally and internationally leading in the field of health economics. You will spend part of your time at the Department of
General Practice of the Erasmus MC. The Department of General Practice consists of a mix of physicians and researchers who work together. The research of the department is mainly about musculoskeletal disorders in general practice, and is a center of excellence for osteoarthritis research.