Heleen Troost and Samantha Hobro are visiting ADSRI as interns for 3 months. Here are their stories.

Heleen Troost

I am from the Netherlands where I am studying at the Vrije University in Amsterdam. Currently I am in the final year of my 2-year Master of Management, Policy-Analysis and Entrepreneurship in Health and Life Science. My specialisation is International Public Health. My internship with ADSRI is part of my degree.

I have always been very interested in the field of reproductive health, and I thought it would be very interesting to examine reproductive health and Indonesian culture. I came into contact with ADSRI through finding an article written by Wienta Diarsvitri, an ADSRI PhD Candidate, on HIV and students living in the Papua and West Papua provinces of Indonesia. ADSRI responded immediately and positively in giving me the opportunity to do my internship here.

The research I am conducting is on the educational reproductive health experiences of Indonesian students who are studying in Australia. I am investigating what kind of information the students received and when, from what sources, and the social environment in which adolescents talk about these topics. Another interesting aspect I am looking at is how the students reflect on their education, possibly having to compare two cultures, and to investigate whether their reproductive health education has influenced their behaviour. To investigate this I am doing a survey among Indonesian students in Australia. For more in depth information, I will conduct interviews with the students. I am staying in Canberra for three months to undertake my research.

Samanta Hobro

I’m a student from Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium - the country of chocolate. Now in my final year of a Master in Science of Population and Development, with a specialisation in demographic research, I have taken the choice to undertake an internship. ADSRI was my first choice for an internship and was one of the quickest and most enthusiastic research areas to reply to me. Thus, I had to come here and I have no regrets.

To complete my master degree, I have to write a thesis and my subject is the interaction between the sharing of household labour and fertility intentions with a gender view. Fertility is a big issue in most developed countries: below replacement fertility adds to the aging of the population, producing a change in the population structure. This concerns us all, since it leads to different social, economic and political prospects. I support the theoretical view of Peter McDonald’s gender equity theory. Fertility change can be explained as an imbalance in gender equity between the different social institutions. This was my primary motivation in applying to ADSRI, although there are many other reasons.

During my internship, with the help of Anna Reimondos and my ANU supervisors Peter McDonald and Edith Gray, I have been looking at the Gender and Generation Survey data from different countries with mixed institutional structures. We have tried to show the effects on fertility intentions of the interaction between the organisation of the family, the perception of household labour sharing and gender policies. At the end of the day, what could have been a better intern experience than that?