Best Dissertation Award 2014 by the Dutch Association for Social Psychological Researchers (ASPO)

ASPO dissertation award 2014 Namkje Koudenburg won the ASPO best-dissertation award. This award (consisting of €500 and a framed certificate) was handed out to the best dissertation in social psychology in the Netherlands between October 2013 and September 2014. Her dissertation is titled “Conversational Flow: The emergence and regulation of solidarity through social interaction”. Her promotores were prof. dr. Tom Postmes and prof. Dr. Ernestine Gordijn (University of Groningen). The award was handed out during the 2014 ASPO conference. This year’s ASPO dissertation award committee consisted of Irene Blanken, Florien Cramwinckel (chair), Seval Gündemir, Mike Keesman, David Maij, Lisa van Reemst, Terri Seuntjens, and Willem Sleegers. The committee evaluated all submitted dissertations on their overall quality (e.g., readability, consistency, relevance) as well as the quality of each separate chapter (e.g., methods, quality of research and conclusions). Namkje’s dissertation was considered to be the best dissertation on all these domains. She used a wide array of different methods and different samples. Many of these samples were unconventional and creative non-student samples. The dissertation consisted of a lot of chapters, and provided convincing evidence for the importance of conversational flow. The dissertation was well written, easy to read and a lot of fun to read. The overall quality of the dissertation was thus very high, and the research described is very relevant for science as well as society.