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Do you want to develop novel ways to measure how much youth care about popularity? Do you want to conduct research at schools to find out whether this causes youth to bully or support bullies? If yes, you have a part to play! We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who is motivated to critically and creatively develop innovative ways to measure how youth may feel rewarded by popularity or threatened by the risk to be unpopular.
Bullying among youth is a major problem with devastating consequences for the victims. In order to develop more effective anti-bullying programmes, we have to better understand what drives bullying and following bullies. Previous research has mainly focused on striving for high status on the deliberate level, but found only weak associations with bullying. We may thus be overlooking other (status) motivations that impact bullying involvement to a much greater extent. In the MAD2bully project - funded by an ERC starting grant - you will not only examine the motivation to 'be on top', but also the motivation to 'not dangle at the bottom' in the social status hierarchy. In addition, as some youth may not be able or willing to truthfully report their deliberate status motivation, you will also examine motivation at the automatic level through implicit and physiological measures.
In this position, you will focus on co-developing status motivation measures, including questionnaires, reaction time paradigms, and especially physiological measures. For the physiological measurement a new paradigm has to be designed and programmed in order to measure responses to status reward and status threat in social (bullying) situations. Furthermore, appropriate procedures for processing the data have to be developed. You will pilot test these measures with primary school students and write articles about the measurement development and research questions that have your interest.
In addition, you will be working in a team with 2 PhD candidates on the project, who will write their dissertations on how these status motivations relate to bullying and following bullies in primary and secondary schools. They will also examine how these associations are affected by individual and contextual factors. You will co-supervise the organisation of data collection, data analysis and the writing of papers, resulting in your co-authoring of PhD candidates' articles.
Fixed-term contract: Depending on the preferred appointment, the employment is for a total period of 3 to 4 years, with an initial one-year contract.
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