#module13

Here I’ll present my internship place, and describe the 4 learning objectives I have set out for this 3-month internship!

Together as a small team of 3 GNH students, I am interning at MawiSpace, a health coaching and health food catering service located in Copenhagen, Denmark. Most of the work is done via the internet through online coaching, blog and media content and health promotion, or out in the field seeing clients and with the catering service. The business is in the early stages of development (started in 2016), and we get the experience of being part of, and contributing to, the development of the business.  

Health behaviour change, health coaching and psychology and interaction with individuals is a significant focus in the Lifestyle and Health Education, and this internship presents me with an opportunity to put into practice theories and models from the various modules, as well as experience what is it like as a professional building a career path in health coaching and promotion. 

As this is the last internship before the BA thesis writing (ahhh, cannot believe it!), I am ideally linking it together, and thankfully it is ideally suited to gather insight and data for my BA thesis. I have yet to define a research question, but I do know the area of interest: health behaviour change and mindset. Working in a health coach setting, I get to intimately observe the subjective lived experience of clients looking to improve their health, barriers that inhibit behaviour change, as well as what facilitates it. Working with people on mindset and health education, I will get a hands-on experience of what works and doesn't work for different people in different contexts. 

Learning Objective 1: Gain coaching skills 

Review coaching models and theories taught in modules (M8)

Refine a coaching framework that works for this context

Analyse and learn from the current real life clients

Learning Objective 2: Learn about competencies needed for setting up a business in the health domain 

Assist in creating an online platform, as well as establishing my own as a health coach part of the team

Organize the coaching material into an optimized system, and

Input with new ideas and use evidence-based theories to improve the material and coaching model where possible

Learning Objective 3: Gain writing, research and content-creation skills

Health promotion via:

Writing blog posts, and

Creating video tutorials

Learning Objective 4: Gain skills in social media health promotion

 Collaborate and create content for videos

1. Get to know and become a part of a research environment - I can deffinetely say that I have expanded my knowledge of how research is designed and conducted and furthermore I have gained practical research experience. Now I understand what does it mean to know something in theory and to actually see how it is done in practice.

I have had chance to engage in some team work with the research staff.

2. Participate in the ongoing project Satin

My first task was to familiriase myself with the clinical study protocol. I have acomplished it on mutiple ocasions. For instance, I had to read a huge stack of Standart operational procedures (SOPs) and sign each one that I have read and understoo them. I think they were about 65 procedures.

The seond taks was to have informative metings with the local project cordinator, which fortunately for me was and my supervisor Sanne. We will meet ususaly when I get new project, so ofcourse we discuss how to do the task. We also talk how the project is progressing, or often about the findings from this project and how many papers can be published in the future.

The third task was to coloborate with the project staff and project participants. I have worked closely with Sanne, the cordinator of the project, with the research assistant Karoline and other research staff, not so much with the participants though.

The fourth task was to assist with project procedure and intervention, which involved preparing forms for the visits or code data in the excel sheets. I had of cource opportunities to be present on some of the visits and to interact with the particiapnts, but not on daily basis. I was more behind the scene person:)

The final task was to develop an ability for data administration, which I believe I have acomplished.

3. Data management

My tasks involved getting insights to proper handling of research data; preparing variety of assesments tools to the project participants; collecting physical activity, dietary, sleep patterns and other quantitative data and performing data processing and statistical analysis. My main responsibility was to prepare the Actigraph accelerometers, to log the collected data in Actilife, data processing and questionnaires. Recalling step by step, I start with initialising the accelerometers, then on each device I put a label with the participant ID number and prepare log sheet. After that I go to Easy trial program and to each participant I activate the actigraph log sheet (ALS), 3 days weight dietary record (WDR) and the set of home questionnaires (HM). When the accelerometers are returned I download the physical activity data from them and then I enter the sleep periods in the software program Actilife.

4. Project managemnet

The goals for this objective were to expand theoretical knowledge about project management to practical one; to be a part of one or multiple areas of research project; to collaborate with students, dietitians, laboratory and scientific staff; to participate in the development and the maintanance of variety of project procedure and to aid with management of the project participants.

During my internship in the Obesity research unit almost everyday I learn new things, sometimes I also research on my own procedures from the project Satin that may have grabed my attention. 

In today’s post I will present a software, called PsychoPy that I found interesting. 

Psychopy is a research and learning tool. It is an attempt to provide a usable psychological presentation suite for experiments developed by non-expert programmers.

PsychoPy is an open-source application to allow the presentation of stimuli and collection of data for a wide range of neuroscience, psychology and psychophysics experiments. It’s a free, powerful alternative to Presentation™ or e-Prime™, written in Python (a free alternative to Matlab™ ).  

It is used by many labs worldwide for psychophysics, cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology, namely -  behavioural experiments,  experiments in developmental psychology, psychophysical experiments .

Sourse: http://psychopy.org/

Satin project uses it for the Consumer Benefit paradigm experiment. It is visual probe task experiment for marketing purposes.

The Visual Probe task takes 8-10 minutes to be completed by the participants. They start with welcome screen and instructions. This task is completed 3 times in visit 2, 7 and 14 during the intervention period. Participants are seated in front of a computer in a quiet space with minimal distractions. The experimenter set the task and talk the instructions trough to ensure the participants have understood.

In the first block images are shown on the screen - two at a time and ask the participants to press as fast as possible the keys T and V on the keyboard. T Key is if the participants see small arrow behind the image pointing up, and if points down then they press V Key. When they are done, they press space on the keyboard to continue.

Then they have the Stop Signal Task, where there images of food items shown. Participants use Y and N key from the keyboard. The participants use Y to say that the food image is above the central line and Y to say is below it. In some point the central line get thicker, Stop Signal appear and they have to stop their response to that trial. There is also distracting images, such as household objects, participants should not respond to these items.

Lastly, the target images are changed to the household items. The participants repeat the same procedure as mentioned above by pressing Y if the image appear above the central line and N if appears below. And the distracting images this time are food items. 

Hi there,  Welcome to my Module 13 internship blog where you will be able to follow me the next 12 weeks during my internship in Roskilde. Where exactly I am doing my internship and what I will be working with I am going to save for a few more days...

FIRST, a short introduction about me. I am 21-year-old danish girl, and since august 2013 I have been studying Global Nutrition and health at PH Metropol in Copenhagen.  My education teaches me about health and nutrition from a lifestyle perspective, looking at e.g. Lifestyle change theories, Nutrition and Physical activity, health psychology, Health coaching, educational strategies and much more. All topics and areas im very interested in and passionate about. 

I have doctors, receptionists, nurses and cleaner ladies around me as my colleagues. As they are working in different fields they have different characteristics.

The doctors around me are representing top quality services in their own fields. They have a personal and professional skills that are required in a private clinic. They are also very friendly and helpful in relation with my internship as well which is a huge help for me in order to complete my learning objectives. The only cultural difference that is in rare cases a bit challenging for me is the huge difference in hierarchy in Hungary between doctors and the other workers or patients in the health industry.

Receptionists are mostly doing a regular receptionist job, handling phone calls, taking appointments, communicating with the incoming patients. They need good communication skills, and a friendly patient centered viewpoint of their job.

The nurses are working with the doctors for instance assisting during an operation, handling patients when they are coming back to the clinic to a control appointment, taking blood samples etc.

At the clinic mostly the plastic surgeons are the ones who are performing surgeries a 12 hour cleaning service during the open hours are required. the is what the cleaning ladies are doing.

Every once in a while MRC staff are invited to attend a journal club presented by a fellow employee. This week’s journal club was my turn to present. The procedure is that the presenter - who is assigned by the group leader-  sends out a paper for all potential attenders to read and ideally prepare questions or points for discussion. I chose the paper based on my interest in its study design, which I thought was an interesting one to debate. Also, that the study shares a few similarities with the research I am working on, so discussing the paper had also fed into my work. As I went and presented the study sections one by one, my colleagues contributed with valuable input from their areas of expertise and we had a great debate indeed. 

I still get nervous whenever I present in a group, but it gets better with time! So this was another chance for a good practice and I believe it went well and was a great learning!

If you are interested, please check out the paper by clicking on the link below: