Sectie Psychologie, Gezondheid & Technologie

A content analysis of terms people use to describe health and environmental issues

Additional information

Type of assignment:             BSc. thesis

Internal/external:                   Internal

How many students?        

Supervision:                          Individually

Includes data collection?      Yes

Type of research:                  Qualitative

Number of ECTS?                15 ECTS

Research assignment

The way people think about health and the environment shapes their behaviour. In a survey that was filled out by 2,300 Dutch citizens, we asked people to indicate 3 terms that they associated with each of three global events (climate change, Covid-19, and the rising energy costs). We also asked them about their behaviour towards these events (e.g., wearing a facemask, recycling, and lowering the thermostat).

In this assignment, you will do a content analysis on the (qualitative) input from participants, collected in this study. You will create a codebook to qualitatively classify the underlying themes, sentiments, emotions, attitudes, etc. reflected by the terms. In addition, you will do in-depth interviews with people from different generations and backgrounds about how they think about public health and climate change.

Who do we look for?

For this assignment we need a student who speaks fluent Dutch, who is interested in qualitative data collection and analysis.