Privacy and Persuasion in Online Social Network Campaigns
This is a phd proposal and the proposal must be written in “my” own words as requested. Please write it as an interest to join this based on the information given below. Try not to add citations as this is supposed to be in my own words:
Aresearch proposal for a (sub)project addressing the research aim of the position in your own words (750 words max.), including:
Theory, research questions and hypotheses (approx. 250 words)
Methods (approx. 300 words)
Expected results and societal relevance (approx. 200 words)
This is some background information:
Online Social Networks (OSN) such as Instagram and Snapchat offer unprecedented technological opportunities to promote a healthy lifestyle among adolescents’ social networks, for example, via ‘peer influencers’. The SocialMovez project will reveal how online social networks can be utilized and how campaigns can be optimized by using innovative data-analytic technologies, while safeguarding youth’s privacy. A team of five researchers will address this aim in a multimethodological approach, including automated analysis of OSN communications, qualitative co-creation focus groups with users, controlled experiments, and a large-scale controlled field intervention validating an OSN-based obesity-prevention campaign in a real online social network.
Your role in the project will be to integrate digital privacy in OSN health campaigning theory and practice. More specifically, you will use theories of behaviour change and informational law to investigate the most effective mechanisms to engage young people in an OSN health campaign, while taking into account their informational and psychological privacy. Your research will involve, for instance, OSN content analysis, focus groups, and experimental designs in online social networks. Therefore, we expect you to have affinity with advanced quantitative methods and a drive to understand behaviour and behaviour change.
The team members will work closely together in reaching the overall objective: developing a framework for effective and responsible OSN health campaigns. Moreover, we will closely collaborate with health practitioners and youth communication professionals. Are you interested to be involved in our team? Then please write a short research proposal that addresses the research aim of the PhD project you are applying for (i.e., How will you integrate digital privacy in OSN health campaigning theory and practice?). We are very curious to find out about you, and your thoughts about which study design and analyses you would use for your project. The proposal will not only demonstrate your current research competencies, but also your own ideas for the project.
