To address EU-TRHeaDS’s main questions, the project combined qualitative policy analysis methodology with an online survey experiment in Belgium and Spain. Qualitative policy analysis methodology was used to reconstruct and compare the institutional, political and policy contexts of Belgium and Spain, focusing on differences in healthcare solidarity ‘in policies’. The qualitative fieldworks conducted in the two countries consisted in the collection of the data from official documents and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders. As a result of this activity, two descriptive reports were produced and they are publicly available in the EU-TRHeaDS project website.
To understand what criteria do individuals mobilise to assess the ‘deservingness’ of mobile EU citizens to access healthcare, an original online survey experiment was carried out with a representative sample of the population in Belgium and Spain. The conjoint experiment consisted in asking respondents to prioritise the access to healthcare among pairs of fictitious but highly plausible healthcare claimants, whose attributes represented a combination of deservingness criteria (nationality, residence status, occupational status, responsibility over the illness). Moreover, the online survey included additional items to account for other variables that may explain healthcare chauvinist attitudes.
Despite the early termination of the fellowship (obtention of a research and teaching position), several dissemination/communication activities have been carried out, including the writing of two publicly available descriptive reports, one scientific publication (a chapter for an edited book), and the participation in two reputed international conferences, where the Fellow acted as paper presenter and panel chair/discussant (19th IMISCOE Annual Conference; 2022 ECPR General Conference).
Moreover, she has been invited to contribute to public outreach activities on the migration-healthcare nexus, including: the participation as invited speaker in a public workshop on the role of migrants in guaranteeing the sustainability of welfare states; the publication of a non-scientific article on the access to healthcare for migrants with precarious legal status in the context of the French Presidential election.
Finally, to raise students’ awareness about bureaucratic barriers to healthcare and encourage career in research, the Fellow organised a role game with master students of the University of Liège, which replicated the survey experiment but in a simpler way and for non-scientific purposes.
Despite the early termination of the fellowship, other dissemination/communication activities are expected to be carried out in the following months (submission of four scientific articles using the qualitative and quantitative data collected; organisation of an open webinar; writing of a non-scientific article for the general public).
