Student Research Assistant for its Labour Market department (f/m) - Ref 22-20

The Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

is recruiting a

Student Research Assistant for its Labour Market department (f/m)

• Ref: 22-20

• Student fixed-term contract for 9 months (part-time, 10 or 15 hours/week) in the Labour Market department

• Enrolment as a Master student at the University of Luxembourg is mandatory

• Expected start date: as soon as possible

LISER invites motivated students for the position of Research Assistant in the project CONSNORM / SOC2050 on the issue of unsustainable consumption behaviours to send us their application. The successful candidate will support a team of researchers in the various tasks involved with the implementation of an incentivized online survey (management of the participant pool) and its exploitation (data management and visualization). The data will be collected over a period of 7 months and will contain three waves.

Your role

As a Research Assistant, your tasks will include:

•  Support in the formatting and translation of survey questionnaires,

•  Support in the implementation of the survey into an online survey platform (Qualtrics),

•  Keeping track of the recruitment of survey participants,

•  Calculation of amounts to be paid to survey participants,

•  Cleaning and merging data from the three waves of the survey,

•  Support in the production of reports and presentations (e.g. data visualization),

•  Possibly additional tasks according to the necessities of the project.

Your profile

•  Master student in data science, economics, social sciences or another data-intensive field of study,

•  Excellent training in programming and data science skills ; coding in Qualtrics, Stata and/or R is a plus,

•  Excellent verbal communication and written skills in English; some working knowledge of French, Luxembourgish or Portuguese would be a plus,

•  Enthusiasm for research, in particular for behavioural economics and experiments, and sustainability issues,

•  Excellent collaboration skills in a diverse team, critical thinking and proactivity.

Application Process

Please submit your complete application (in English) via our online system: https://jobs.liser.lu/jobs :

•  Curriculum Vitae;

•  Cover letter outlining your experience, your skills and your interests in line with the project’s themes (maximum 1 page);

•  Certificate of enrolment at the University of Luxembourg.

Please note that the position will remain open until filled.

For administrative matters, please send an email to [email protected]

For further questions about the job position or the project, please get in touch with [email protected]

About CONSNORM

The megatrends in today’s society bring hope (technological acceleration, artificial intelligence, robotization, progress in biotechnology, etc.), but also existential challenges (global warming, pollution, reduction in biodiversity, rising cost of raw materials and energy...). As market economies continually seek growth, many types of goods and services contribute to worsening these trends. Many actors in society - public authorities, non-governmental organizations, citizens - are trying to raise awareness about these fundamental issues and call for more sober and responsible consumer behavior.

This project aims to improve our understanding of a global and essential problem: Why do we collectively experience so much difficulty in changing our consumption patterns when we know that they threaten the economic, social and environmental system in the short and medium term? Are there concrete solutions to change these behaviours, and can we measure their potential effectiveness? Thanks to an incentivized online survey, we will measure participants’ consumption behaviors on a set of common “unsustainable” goods such as meat, plastic bottles and packaging, private-car-based mobility… We will study the social factors influencing consumption, and in particular use monetary incentives to elicit social norms and public support for policy interventions targeting these behaviors. Furthermore, we will use the repeated nature of the survey to evaluate the impact of specific interventions (various types of information to participants such as environmental externalities, behaviors in society, social norms and support for public policies) on consumption behaviors. The research assistant will support the research team in the various tasks involved with the implementation of this online survey and its exploitation.

About LISER

LISER is a publicly funded research institute located in Luxembourg and dedicated to applied empirical research in economic, social and spatial sciences. Multi- and interdisciplinarity is a key element for stimulating scientific innovation. The Institute attracts top researchers from all over the world and high-level doctoral training is a vibrant part of the Institute’s activities. The Institute‘s staff consists of about 180 employees (including a survey and data center), more than 50% of the staff being researchers, mainly from the fields of economics, sociology, and geography.

The Institute is located on the new Belval campus in the south of Luxembourg, which hosts the University of Luxembourg and a substantial part of the country’s publicly funded research facilities, i.e. LISER, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS ) cross-national data center, the Luxembourg institutes of Health (LIH ) and of Science and Technology (LIST ).

LISER is an Equal Opportunity Employer

LISER particularly encourages female students to apply.