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Interesting PhD vacancy at the Eindhoven University of Technology:

PhD student on the project “Surfing the information waves: Finding, revealing, and evaluating information online” at the School of Innovation Sciences.

Job description
The Ph.D. student is expected to do research leading to a Ph.D. thesis in the project “Surfing the information waves: Finding, revealing, and evaluating information online”. At the core of this project lies the question how people deal with the reliability of information on the Internet, to what extent the formal and informal mechanisms that facilitate reliable exchange of information offline have online equivalents, and to what extent new online mechanisms and tools are and can be developed to facilitate reliable
information exchange.

Typical questions of interest are: How do people discern useful and reliable information from useless and unreliable information in online settings? How can users be motivated to provide reliable information and how can the provision of unreliable information be minimized? To what extent do the answers to these questions depend on the kind of online setting? For the project we anticipate doing research in several areas of application, such as medical information sites and groups, social networking sites
(Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Xing, etc), and general economic and consumer sites, such as eBay, Amazon.

Requirements
The candidate should have a Masters degree (or equivalent) in the social sciences (sociology, psychology, political or communication science), excellent knowledge and skills in quantitative methods of data analysis, and familiarity with new forms of online communication. Most of all, we are looking for someone with a natural curiosity with respect to online interaction of any kind. Knowledge about theories pertaining to the topic in (social) psychology or sociology would be an additional asset. The candidate should be proficient in English (speaking and writing).

Conditions of employment
We offer a (full-time) Ph.D. position for 4 years. Gross salaries are in the range of €28K gross per annum in the first year and €35K during the fourth year and include attractive enefits (e.g. technical infrastructure, child care, sports facilities). A small teaching load an be part of the job.

More information can be found at:
http://www.tue-tm.org/snijders/PhD/

Application
Send your application or requests for further information by email to Prof. dr. C. Snijders (c.c.p.snijders ‘at’ tue.nl). The application should consist of a motivation for your application, and extended curriculum vitae, a description of your obtained scientific degree, and a list of courses and the grades you obtained for those courses.