News
Annemarie Wagemakers appointed personal professor Participatory Community Health Promotion
The Executive Board has appointed Annemarie Wagemakers as personal professor Participatory Community Health Promotion in the Health and Society Group, Department of Social Sciences. The appointment is effective from 1 January 2023. Her research focuses on program implementation and evaluation, citizen science and the development of theories, methods and tools.
Annemarie Wagemakers (1964) studied Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University & Research (WUR). During her study, she already had a special interest in the combined influence of lifestyle and the social and physical environments of health and well-being. Over the years, Wagemakers conducted research in the field of women’s health, health and age discrimination and community health promotion. In 2010 she received her PhD from WUR, entitled ‘Community Health Promotion. Facilitating and evaluating coordinated action to create supportive environments’.
Health and Society
Wagemakers became an assistant (and later associate) professor in the group Health and Society at WUR. She was involved in developing and implementing the curriculum of the Bachelor Health and Society and the Master Health, Communication and Life Sciences. In her research she focuses on socially vulnerable groups with the aim to improve health and wellbeing, promote healthy lives and to reduce health inequities. Her research has been published in various scientific journals, including Social Science & Medicine, BMC Public Health, Evaluation and Program Planning and Health Promotion International.
Participatory Community Health Promotion
Wagemakers’ work focuses on community health promotion. She has a wide experience with complex public-health-promotion projects, and she aims to develop innovative research designs to understand, facilitate and evaluate strategies to promote health and wellbeing. To do so, she uses a whole systems approach and Participatory Action Research (PAR). In essence, this is research in which stakeholders, including citizens, are involved. Moreover, PAR emphasizes participation and action by stakeholders, centres on knowledge useful to people in everyday life and seeks to understand the world by trying to change it. Crucial concepts in PAR are citizen participation and intersectoral collaboration: both contribute to health through multiple pathways and serve purposes, such as the effectiveness of programs, the creation of supportive environments for health and empowerment of stakeholders.
Citizen Science
In several projects of Wagemakers, citizens conduct research activities themselves: citizen science. Wagemakers: “In a former project with RIVM, we explored how being a citizen scientist contributes to health and wellbeing and based on this, developed a model that shows the possible effects of citizen science. This model presents a basis for studying the opportunities of citizen science in the field of public health, for example to increase empowerment of citizens, besides the increase of research capacity. In this, it is important to address the challenges that go with citizen science, for example ethical questions and how to work practice-driven rather than research driven while generating scientifically robust and relevant data”.
The Coordinated Action Checklist
Wagemakers also uses PAR to develop methods and tools that fit the needs and wishes of stakeholders in practice. An example of a tool is the Coordinated Action Checklist. The list contains 25 statements to evaluate collaboration in a coalition. “The Checklist facilitates dialogue and sharing experience. Based on this, the coalition members can improve their actions and make results of their collaboration visible”, says Wagemakers. The checklist has been used by several projects and even more coalitions in the field of health and wellbeing.