Published on January 12, 2023 – On the 7th of December, a new meeting of the ‘Be-Prepared’ consortium took place at the RIVM headquarters in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. The consortium was launched in June 2022 and focuses on in-depth research about improving pandemic preparedness from a behavioural perspective.
‘Be-Prepared’ (Behavioural Science for Pandemic Preparedeness) is a collaboration between the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and four Dutch universities (University of Amsterdam, Radboud university medical center, Utrecht University and University of Twente). Within this broader project, researchers from ACHC and ASCoR (Julia van Weert, Bas van den Putte, Eline Smit, Saar Mollen, Mark Boukes, Toni van der Meer, Nida Gizem Yilmaz and Adriana Solovei) focus on analyzing the media use, media content, and media effects on adherence to preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Moreover, the role of interpersonal communication is being analysed in this context. Other topics explored within the consortium are, among others, behavioural determinants, support for policy measures, and wellbeing during a pandemic. The existing research plans within the consortium are publicly available and can be found on the OSF platform: OSF | Be-Prepared Consortium.
The in-depth research is based on data that were collected by RIVM’s Corona Behavioural Unit between March 2020 and September 2022. More information about the data collected by the Behavioural Unit can be found here (in Dutch).