Two PhD positions – FLY (Food-related Lifestyles in Youth) project (1.0 FTE)

Are you passionate about ensuring the sustainability of our environment and planet? Dou you want to contribute to more sustainable lifestyles for all? Then this project might be of interest to you! We offer a warm welcome and provide a joint introduction for our new colleagues. As part of this we will facilitate you getting to know the organization and show you around our faculty and university.

Transitioning to more sustainable food-related lifestyles is urgently needed to decrease greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. This transition can only be successful if we all change our behaviours. Thus far, most behavioural science research focuses on people’s motivation for sustainable food-related lifestyles and is less concerned with their capabilities and opportunities to change to more sustainable food-related lifestyles. Also, most research thus far focuses on people of higher socio-economic backgrounds, whereas more disadvantaged socio-economic groups are known to lag in the transition to more sustainable food-related lifestyles.

In our FLY-project, we aim to investigate motivations, capabilities, and opportunities related to sustainable food-related lifestyles in socio-economically disadvantaged groups. We especially focus on youth in vocational education, both because adolescence is a formative phase in life and because young people can act as effective agents of change. We study how more sustainable food-related lifestyles and underlying factors develop in early adolescence and how these disseminate in social networks, focusing not only on individuals’ behaviours but also on the diffusion of more sustainable food-related lifestyles. We also develop intervention strategies to promote the transition to more sustainable food-related lifestyles in young people, by innovatively focusing on building community-level capabilities, opportunities, and motivation to adopt (more) sustainable behaviours.

In our research we use a mixed-method approach, combining focus group discussions with a cohort study and behavioural/communication science experimental studies in which intervention components are piloted and evaluated, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Parts of the intervention components are co-created with young people. In combination, this ensures a rich and in-depth knowledge of the barriers and facilitators of the transition to more sustainable food-related lifestyles in youth and enables the development of effective interventions strategies. To ensure our research makes a difference in practice, we work with the Netherlands Nutrition Centre to develop a multi-component toolkit for use in schools to promote the transition to more sustainable food-related lifestyles.

We envisage that one of the PhD candidates will conduct the focus groups and intervention components pilot-testing. Another PhD candidate will conduct the cohort survey and survey data analyses. Both PhD candidates will contribute to the development of the multicomponent intervention toolkit.

This is an inter- and transdisciplinary project, and as a PhD candidate you will work with team members in several academic departments and societal partners who bring various types and expertise and experience to the project. You will be embedded in the Department Interdisciplinary Social Science, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, and work closely with team members in the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Faculty of Humanities, the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Faculty of Geosciences, and the Netherlands Nutrition Centre. You will be supervised by an interdisciplinary team, consisting of Dr. Marijn Stok and Dr. Michèlle Bal (Interdisciplinary Social Science, daily supervisors, in Dutch: co-promotores), and Prof. dr. John de Wit (Interdisciplinary Social Science) and Prof. Dr. Eggo Müller (Media and Culture Studies), who will be main supervisors promotors (in Dutch: promotors).

You will work in a co-operative and dedicated team that combines a focus on work with attention for the people doing the work. As a team, we will guide you in your research and teaching tasks and we will adapt or guidance to what works for you. We will also guide you in your professional development and in exploring and pursuing options for future your work, be it in academia or elsewhere. Your work will include a 10% teaching tasks, with a possible extension to 20%.