The overall aim of this project is to promote the mental health and well-beingof students at Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, based on the Stepped Care model, developed in the program for the promotion of mental health in higher education - ACCES Program. Focusing on a promotion and prevention approach, and adopting a logic of collective participation, the following specific objectives are identified: 1. Development of mental health promotion, prevention and adjustment activities (level 1 and 2), with a view to improving skills related to mental health literacy, mental resilience and stress management; 2. Strengthening psychotherapeutic and psychiatric responses for students with common mental disorders of mild to moderate severity (level 3), with a view to early intervention and avoiding more serious pathologies; 3. Strengthening the mechanisms for identifying situations of risk or serious mental illness and referring them to specialized health services (level 4 and 5); 4. Promoting the active participation of the student association in the development, implementation and evaluation of activities;5. Inclusion of students with specific educational needs and other vulnerable groups (1st year students, displaced students, national and international students, students benefiting from school social action, scholarship students from PALOP countries, women students, and LGBTQIA+ students), across the board in the activities developed.

Time-to-Engage explores individual and contextual factors that interfere with the intention to use digital technologies in health by citizens in advanced age. It also aims at understanding how these factors are shaped by levels of digital competencies and engagement and by availability, accessibility, and affordability of digital equipment.

This study aims to monitor and analyze the PICCLE - Intervention Plan for Citizens Competent in Reading and Writing, a project of the National Reading Plan (PNL2027). Specifically, it aims to design and implement a tool for monitoring and evaluating the results of the use of the digital platform developed under PICCLE, focusing on its application in a number of pilot schools.

 The research plan focuses on the relations between Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and Conventional Medicine (CM) in Portugal. By CAM we mean a diversified set of medicines, therapies or therapeutic practices that have in common 1) the demarcation from conventional medicine, 2) occupying a marginal position in health care systems in the Western societies; 3) proclaiming the possession of a body of knowledge more or less systematised on health and illness guiding therapeutic practices; 4) demarcating from other therapeutic approaches, such as popular medicines, with an empirical basis and without formalisation and codification of knowledge and its transmission, or therapeutic modalities based on esoteric and spiritual elements, such as religion and esotericism. Specifically, for the purpose of the operationalisation of the research, it includes the seven medicines / therapies that are regulated in Portugal since 2013: traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, phytotherapy, osteopathy and chiropractic. The objective is to explore these relations at four levels: i) at the institutional level of public policies (essentially in terms of legislation that regulates the teaching and practice of the various therapies); ii) in the field of organisational projects (such as clinics with pluralistic therapeutic offers); iii) at the level of individual decision of the doctor or the CAM therapist (in particular by mutual referral or use of therapeutic techniques from another therapeutic system); iv) at the level of the patient's individual decision, through the complementarity or alternation of CM and CAM. It is intended, in particular, to show the concordances and dissonances that occur between the various levels. In order to respond to these objectives, a mixed methods strategy is adopted, combining extensive-quantitative procedures for collecting and analysing information with intensive-qualitative procedures, using different types of s...

  The use of medicines, dietary supplements, and natural products, to enhance physical, intellectual, and social performance – referred here as performance consumptions – is growing in current societies. It is a complex phenomenon that reflects a change in the conventional use of therapeutic resources, expanding it beyond the realm of health and sickness. This project aims to grasp this modern phenomenon by analyzing performance consumptions within the contexts that spur them. Hence, the focus of analysis – which has commonly been on individual consumption practices - will be redirected towards the social contextuality that structures individuals’ daily lives. The central research object is twofold. Firstly, it concerns practices and dispositions to engage in performance consumptions within specific social contexts. Secondly, it regards their literacy on, and the sources of information used for, different types of consumption. The project focuses on three professional groups associated with contexts of high pressure for performance.The study will be conducted in the urban areas of Lisbon and Oporto. Data collection will follow a mixed methods approach: focus groups, surveys and semi-structured interviews. Additionally, the indicators regarding literacy patterns and information sources, will be replicated to a sample of consumers of performance products, in pharmacies and food supplements stores. This research seeks to respond to several imperatives. It will contribute to further sociological knowledge of a phenomenon with multiple social impacts, on which empirical studies are still scarce. It shall provide a set of indicators on new forms of social demands on labor, which may support policies to promote a social healthier work environments. It operationalizes the issue of literacy in a multidisciplinary perspective, widening scientific perception and the grounds for citizenship on this topic.   Research team:    Noémia Mendes Lopes, PI (CIES-IUL, Egas Moniz CR...

 Therapeutic consumption among youths has been a topic of recent interest in various scientific fields, namely medical, social and political. This interest is focused on the consumption of products to enhance cognitive and body performance to which this generational group is most exposed. Our project falls within this domain and the object of analysis is the trajectories of performance enhancement consumption among youths in Portugal, more specifically on the consumption of the so-called smart drugs and lifestyle drugs. While the former are linked to investments in cognitive performance (enhancing intellectual performance or overcoming natural or neurophysiologic limits), the latter are linked to body performance (investment in growth, muscle development, etc). This spectrum of performance consumption encompasses both pharmaceutical and natural products. The key purpose of our project is to assess the specificity of the emerging youth therapeutic cultures, namely in terms of performance investments (pharmacological and natural), and how these display the blurring of the traditional boundaries between health and illness, between the normal and the pathological. The main analytical objective is to identify the cultural dispositions of youths vis-à-vis these consumptions as well as the role of information networks - notably the internet and everyday sociability contexts - in the production of these dispositions. More information - Final Report available here.        

  Trata-se de um estudo de impacto da implementação das turmas com Percursos Curriculares Alternativos (PCA) e dos Planos de Acompanhamento, de Desenvolvimento e de Recuperação no sucesso escolar dos alunos, realizado por solicitação da DGIDC do Ministério da Educação. O estudo integrou i) a caracterização nacional das turmas de PCA com a discriminação do contingente de turmas e de alunos envolvidos, o ano de escolaridade e respetivos resultados e ii) a realização de um conjunto de 16 estudos de caso, distribuídos pelas diferentes Direções Regionais de Educação (DRE).

  The aim of the research project that we propose to carry out is to contribute to extending sociological knowledge of the logic(s) and rationalities that embrace the present-day therapeutic pluralism that has spread among the lay universes. In concrete terms, on the basis of actual daily experiences, it is intended to ascertain the criteria that determine the choice between pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapeutic options. In particular, it is to ascertain lay criteria for the credibility of information sources and the criteria for therapeutic effectiveness and risk assessment, which guide the therapeutic practices adopted. As a corollary, it is intended to confer visibility on the social content and constructed nature of the lay knowledges that underpin and "self"-legitimise therapeutic management options.

The project aims at producing a first set of assessment items of the PNL (National Reading Plan), regarding its implementation, the attitudes towards reading of different public sectors, and the PNL impacts in fostering reading and literacy. The final goal is to design a proposal for an Evaluation System of the National Reading Plan. A mixed method approach is used, combining documentary analyses, surveys, interviews and case studies.

The project's objective is to discuss and present some new theoretical proposals and to operationalise key concepts based on micro-data from the European Community Households Panel (ECHP), with a view to making an innovative contribution to the social characterisation of contemporary Portugal in the European context. The intention is to cross the problematics of social classes and underclass and the distribution of incomes and poverty. It will combine traditional approaches taken by the analysis of income that is characteristic of economic science, with some core areas of sociological research, such as the structured systems of social inequalities. The presentation of the ways of life concept will complement and deepen in a qualitative perspective this objective.

The purpose of this project is the establishment of an observation and analysis implement on the two central processes which are transforming the portuguese development pattern: the recombination process of the competitive factors which is giving raise to new factors such as quality, flexibility and strategic capacity as a result of the internationalization; the production process of new forms of social exclusion.