Academics

The MSBBSS programme is designed for full-time education and is taught completely in English. The programme has an international orientation with students and teachers from various backgrounds in order to prepare students for a globalized labour market.

The programme has an inspirational, challenging teaching and learning environment that invites commitment from both students and teachers. It stimulates a lot of interaction and cooperation between your co-students and yourself. Discussion of and critical reflection on recent developments in research is an integrated part of the curriculum. You will learn not only from teachers and supervisors but also from each other.

All teachers involved in the programme possess high-level teaching and research skills. The content of the courses (and especially the research projects) is closely connected to the research conducted by teachers and supervisors within the programme.

All lecturers teach about their own research field. Therefore, our students are among the first to learn from new discoveries by our teachers, which provides a unique learning environment for our students. So, students are up to date on recent developments and findings and participate in current research.

Many students have also had the opportunity to become involved in current research and gain work experience as student assistants on staff research projects. Furthermore, students can benefit from the (inter)national research networks of the teachers, and indeed, several theses have been written in collaboration with (inter)national co-supervisors.

The research Master's programme MSBBSS trains students into becoming qualified methodologists and statisticians for the behavioural, biomedical, and social sciences. For this purpose, students complete a programme that focuses on major concepts, theories, statistical procedures and models related to methods and statistics in the areas mentioned.

As part of the programme they learn how to:
 

• develop new statistical techniques/methods;
• relate theory to practice;
• apply statistics to answer research questions;
• work with statistical software;
• independently complete the empirical cycle of formulating a research question/goal, developing a research design, collecting data, analysing the data, drawing conclusions, and reporting the research findings clearly to a scientific audience.

In addition, they learn how to explain methodology and statistics to researchers who want to apply methodology and statistics in their own research.

At the end of the MSBBSS programme students are able to develop new statistical techniques/ methods, execute methodological and statistical research and write a scientific report: the Master’s thesis. The thesis has the form of a publishable research paper and submission to a journal is strongly encouraged (about one of every three theses is eventually published).