Happy 2024 to everyone! 2023 has been an eventful year filled with excitement and significant milestones. To highlight the hard work of our research team, we have compiled this 2023 wrapped year-review, summarizing publications, conferences, and milestones of the year.
Publish, publish & publish!
Publishing articles is a significant achievement for researchers, and our team has certainly been active in 2023. Last year, our research group proudly published ten articles and one preprint! On our website, a summary of all articles can be read to get a better understanding of the research. With these summaries, we aim to make research accessible to the public by using easy to understand language.
Marloes published 'Providing Extra Information Increases Blood Donor Return after Deferral, While Offering an Alternative Good Deed Does Not,' in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Additionally, she was featured in an article on 'Plasma Collection and Supply in Europe, Proceedings of an International Plasma and Fractionation Association and European Blood Alliance Symposium,' officially released this year in Vox Sanquinis.
Caroline, along with her co-authors, has published three articles in 2023. The first explores 'The Relationship between Incentives, Social Norms, and Prosocial Behavior' and is featured in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. The second article delves into 'Studying the Role of Public Trust for Blood Donations Across European Countries' and is published in the Journal of Health Psychology. The third took stock of the blood donor incentive landscape across the globe, published in Transfusion Medicine Reviews.
Joris has published two articles this year. The first entitled 'The Social Contagion of Prosocial Behaviour: How Neighbourhood Blood Donations Influence Individual Donation Behaviour in Health & Place, ,' and the second, 'Did You Donate? Talking about Donations Predicts Compliance with Solicitations for Donations,' is in Plos One.
Alexandra has shared a preprint of her first PhD article titled ‘Blood, It Runs in the Family: Intergenerational Transmission of Blood-Donor Behavior.’ Additionally, she is actively working on her second article, focusing on the 'serious game' with results through the NEMO Science Live program.
Samira published two articles this year in her field of interest in Lebanon. Her first article ‘Miss, our clothes are clean: Contesting liminality in Lebanese kindergarten classrooms’ was published in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. And her second article ‘Towards creative development: The case of international development in Lebanon’ was published in The Philippines Sociological Review.
Conferences & more
We find communicating our research and reaching out to fellow colleagues over the world important, and it shows! This year, our team attended a total of 16 conferences and events!
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Caroline shared updates at the Recent Advances in the Economics of Philanthropy workshop at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), the Behavioral Transformations workshop at VU Amsterdam, the European Association for Social Psychology meeting in Krakow, and the International Convention of Psychological Science in Brussels. Furthermore, the whole team was present at the European Conference on Donor Health and Management (ECDHM) in Vienna, and you can read about their experiences here. Notably, Caroline, Alexandra, and Joris organized a workshop on bridging research and practice!
Marloes presented a poster on the Donordruppels loyalty program at the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT) in Gothenburg. Alongside Samira, she engaged in networking with social scientists from Canada and Australia. Marloes also showcased a poster on Donordruppels at the Dutch Nederlandse Vereniging voor Bloedtransfusie (NVB) congress and was invited to speak at the Association of Donor Recruitment Professionals International Showcase and the IBTO workshop on 'Optimal Use of Recovered and Source Plasma for Fractionation.'
Joris attended no less than six events! At The Behavioral Transformations Workshop in Amsterdam, he presented a poster on the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood's Lifeblood Teams program. Additionally, he participated in the 11th European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP) Conference, presenting an overview of his studies on the social contagion of blood donation, compliance with solicitations for donations, and the design of the study on the group donation program in Australia. Joris also presented preliminary findings at the 23rd Day of Sociology in Ghent, focusing on developing a socio-psychological typology of blood and plasma donors. He further shared results from his project on the social contagion of blood donation at the WZB workshop on Recent Advances in the Economics of Philanthropy and the WZB workshop on Corporate Philanthropy and Individual Donations in Berlin.
Alexandra delivered a presentation on 'serious game' at the NVB congress. During the ERNOP conference in Zagreb, she presented the results of her first paper on the intergenerational transmission of blood donor behavior. Lastly, at the Deconstructing Donation Study Group Conference in London, she shared the results of the game study.
Samira was busy presenting new papers at conferences as well. At the Deconstructing Donation Study Group Conference in London, she presented the co-authored paper “Fluid Histories: Historical perspectives on power dynamics, transnational solidarity, and bioethical landscapes of blood donation at the American University of Beirut”. She presented the co-authored paper “A comparative policy analysis of blood donor eligibility criteria across 18 healthcare institutions in Lebanon” at the ECDHM in Vienna and also on the ISBT conference in in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Lou attended the Stem Cell Network congress in Aachen, where she did a poster presentation on the plans for her research. At the ECDHM in Vienna, Lou presented the finetuned plans for her research and the preliminary results of her systematic literature review. Lastly, she presented the same at the Deconstructing Donations congress in London, adding a start of the interviewing process.
Beside attending these conferences, our supervisor Eva-Maria had the opportunity to travel to Tokyo for the Biomedical Excellence for Safer Transfusion (BEST) meeting. An unforgettable experience where treasurable new connections were made. Furthermore, beside contributing to everyone’s work, co-authoring and publishing, Eva was actively trying to engage the public with blood donation. In collaboration with the Boerhaave Science Museum, a temporary exhibition on “The Power of Plasma!” opened last year. She was also invited as a guest speaker on the West Best Talkshow and she organized “Een bloedmooie avond” in Pakhuis de Zwijger. All of which were great successes and help to spreading awareness about blood donation and our research to the public. More about these wonderful activities can be read in our blog posts.
Team Building
As colleagues, we collaborate daily, but we also prioritize ‘gezelligheid’ and having a good relationship with each other. During the writing retreat in Limburg, our team not only dedicated time to enhancing our writing skills but also enjoyed each other's company. This experience brought our team even closer together!
In addition, Sanquin organized a retreat specifically for PhD students. This resulted in a feeling of community among us and a sense that we are not alone even though it might be difficult sometimes.
New Team Members
Alongside our current team, two interns, Lisanne and Jamie, from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam MPA master’s program contributed to Alexandra's Social Media project this year. They provided valuable insights from interviews with marketing professionals from international blood banks and conducted a framework analysis of Sanquin's social media material. Their internships were completed successfully and now Alexandra is continuing this research by further analyzing the interviews for her own project! Jamie stayed to work for the research group as a research-assistant to update the donor-research website and write blog posts.
Furthermore, a new PhD researcher joined our team in September! Yara Dixon will be working with us for the next four years to complete her doctorate, researching a better match of donor blood for sickle cell disease patients.
Happy New Year!
Now let’s wrap it up! 2023 was a very busy and exiting year, providing us with great buildings stones for 2024! We want to wish everyone a very happy new year and hope that it will be a year full of insightful research and happy memories!
Team Donor Studies :)
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