The fellowships are open to bachelor’s students at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG), who are in their second year or above. Fellowships are a maximum of 53 hours of work in total, for €19 per hour, on a freelance basis.


Bachelor fellowships (1st semester 2025-2026 (September 2025))

Prevention of Violence Against Children | Sophia Backhaus & Patty Leijten

This project addresses the prevention of violence against children by diving into the specific effects of parenting interventions. As of 2023, the World Health Organization recommends these interventions globally as a public health strategy to reduce violent parenting. Evidence shows that such programmes significantly reduce physical and emotional violence, with effects that persist over time and across diverse parent populations. However, we still lack clarity on what kinds of violence these interventions actually prevent. Do they stop parents from slapping, or also from more severe acts like burning or choking? 

To answer this question, the research assistant will support the expansion of our aggregate and individual participant data meta-analysis by harmonizing violence outcomes across randomised studies. This work will generate critical insights into the specific behaviors that parenting programmes reduce, informing policy and future intervention design.

We are looking for a research assistant who (i) is interested in, and potentially already familiar with, literature on interventions to reduce violence against children and (ii) has an interest in, and potentially already experience with, aggregate and individual participant data meta-analysis methodology.

Deadline to apply: August 22nd 2025 (an interview may be part of the application procedure in the case of many applicants). 

Invisible Conflicts | Saurabh Khanna

We will be building a dataset of "invisible conflicts" - the idea is to have a stronger focus on global/regional conflicts where the conflicts' presence in media narratives (using data from newsapi) is much less pronounced than the ground level losses to human life (using cleaned ACLED data). The long-term goal is to systematically assess the visibility of each conflict in the news media landscape and suggest ways to improve visibility where possible.

The student research assistant would help with

basic data cleaning so we can map the news and ACLED datasets to each other

• simple exploratory data analysis once the two datasets have been connected

Deadline to apply: August 29th 2025 (an interview may be part of the application procedure in the case of many applicants). 

We encourage everyone to apply, regardless of background! If you have any questions, you can always reach out to edu-rpa-conflictsociety-fmg@uva.nl.