Congratulations to Bryce Bettens and Maya Borrizée, who were both granted FWO PhD Fellowships!
Bryce's project is titled "From Arrival to Later Life: Life-Course Dynamics of Migrant Morbidity and Mortality" (MORBIMIG), and Prof. Sylvie Gadeyne will supervise it.
Migrants and their descendants are a fast-growing part of the Belgian population, yet we know very little about how their health develops over the life course. Bryce will fill this gap with a unique dataset. It combines national population registers, census data and morbidity data from Intego, a Flemish GP network, and links population and primary-care data in a new way. Using event-history analysis, competing-risks and multistate models, and decomposition techniques, he will compare disease incidence, mortality and survival after diagnosis. The comparison covers migration wave, country of origin, generation and socioeconomic position.
Maya's project is called "If the Shoe Fits the Parents' Class, Does the Child Wear It? Children's Active Role in Taste Acquisition". It will be supervised by Prof. Dieter Vandebroeck and Prof. Jessy Siongers.
Taste is central to sociology, yet how people acquire it is still under-theorised. Most research treats it as a one-way transfer of parental dispositions to children. Maya takes a different approach and looks at taste as relational and co-constructed. She asks how class and gender shape the acquisition of fashion taste. To find out, she will carry out ethnographic observations in shoe stores, interview parents and run card-game activities with children aged 5-11.
