Lifelines can help you study the determinants and effects of mental health

Are you interested in population based data to boost your research?

Since 2006 Lifelines collected longitudinal data on physical and mental wellbeing of 167,000 inhabitants of the Northern Netherlands. Lifelines has a unique three-generation design, including all ages. The Lifelines data and biobank can be used for a wide range of studies, e.g. on wellbeing, (subjective) health, mental health and recently data has been collected on the impact of Covid. The UMCG, RUG/AJSPH and Lifelines started the Lifelines corona study which aims to study the environmental and genetic risk factors of the COVID-19 infection as well as the psychosocial and economic effects of the pandemic on society. This resulted in more than half a million returned questionnaires, still counting. The new collected COVID data is already available for all researchers that wish to apply. We now have a special fee of € 2900 (ex 21% VAT) for applications that include a COVID related study aim. For genetic data the fee is currently €4900. Furthermore, additional questionnaires can be added to the Lifelines protocol at the request of researchers. Feel free to check out the Lifelines wiki for meta data descriptions on the Lifelines data collection (including Covid-data). For more information on data access you can also contact Lifelines directly at research lifelines.nl

Elissa El Khawli, a PhD student in the Organizational Psychology Group, is part of a working group of RUG-UMCG PhDs and staff on this multi-wave Lifelines survey n Covid-19 with ca. 135,000 participants from the Northern Netherlands. She recently joined this group as a representative of the Social Science Center for Health and Well-Being and her main task is to brainstorm ideas for new items in upcoming surveys. If you have any items or questions you would be interested in adding to the survey, you can contact her ( e.a.el.khawli rug.nl ) and she can discuss/coordinate with the working group. For a nice overview of some of the findings that have been collected so far, have a look here: https://coronabarometer.nl/ .