Marleen Foets, born in Leuven, Belgium, in 1951. Ph.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Fellow (1 September 2010 – 30 June 2011)
EXPLAINING ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN HEALTH AND IN HEALTH CARE USE
Aim of my research was to review from a social science perspective the output of Dutch research on ethnicity and health. This field of research is dominated by epidemiology and merely carried out at Medical Faculties, in whih social scientists operate quite separate from colleagues at Social Science Faculties. In epidemiology, attention to conceptual issues is often limited. Many studies in epidemiology take into account socioecomomic position, but cultural factors and experience of discrimination are seldom investigated.
I concentrated my research on the following aspects: ethnic differences in overweight and obesity, in prenatal and antenatel care, the use of mental health care by migrants, and on conceptualisation of ethnicity in European research in mortality studies, studies into cardiovascular disease, cancer and infectious diseases.