One out of four children in the Netherlands has a chronic disease. The majority of these children have asthma. If you have to deal with asthma during your childhood and adolescence, does it impact your feeling of happiness? Can you still be resilient?
Eén op de vier kinderen groeit op met een chronische ziekte. De meeste van deze chronisch zieke kinderen hebben astma. Als je leeft met astma, heeft dit invloed op je geluksgevoel en weerbaarheid?

Background: Due to the shift in dominating diseases from acute (life threatening) diseases to chronic conditions, many children grow up dealing with a chronic disease. Chronic diseases can have a substantial impact on children’s life: mentally and physically. Especially during adolescence this can become an issue: a phase in life where children discover their identity and do not want to deviate from their peers.
But what is happiness in the face of health? Defining death is easy; it is dichotomous. Describing a particular disease is already harder: which criteria do you need to fulfill to have this disease? But defining happiness in the face of health seems almost impossible. What means happiness? How does it relate to well-being, life satisfaction and quality of life? Is it a single definition or a broader concept? And when this is determined, the next challenge arises: how to measure happiness and use it well within healthcare research?
Objective: During this internship you perform a (systematic) review on the definitions of happiness used in health-care research and write a proposal how to measure it.
Experience: During this internship you will gain experience in setting up a structured search query. You’ll learn how to be creative in searching scientific literature in poorly defined keywords and concepts. You will get support in the whole process and help in how to report the results in a scientific article. Additionally, you can participate in various activities of the research group (meetings etc.).

Organizers:
UMC Julius Centrum  in samenwerking met Wilhelmina Kinderziekenhuis.

Contact:
Sabine van der Laan: s.e.i.vanderlaan-4@umcutrecht.nl