dr. Sarah Anrijs
Postdoctoral researcher at the research group for Media, Innovation and Communication Technologies, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University.
Contact | More info | @SAnrijs
Digital inequalities
Digital inclusion
Program monitoring and evaluation (M&E)
Realistic evaluation approaches
Sarah Anrijs is a postdoctoral researcher at the imec research group for Media, Innovation and Communication Technologies (imec-mict-UGent). She holds a bachelor's degree in Secondary Education (Artevelde University College), and a master’s degree and doctoral degree in Communication Sciences (Ghent University).
Sarah joined imec-mict-UGent in August 2016. From 2019 until the end of 2022 she was granted a BOF-predoc-mandate from Ghent University. In her dissertation “Digital exclusion and the welfare state: A systematic mismatch?”, Sarah conducted survey-based research into citizens opportunities and difficulties to use essential internet services (e.g., banking apps, government apps). Moving beyond existing approaches, she developed a new survey approach to study who gain benefits from internet services. Furthermore she ensured that hidden and harder-to-reach populations (e.g., people living in poverty, low-literate and low-educated people) also got a voice in her survey results through collaboration with socio-cultural organizations and through iterative simplification of the survey questions.
Currently, Sarah is working on the scientific monitoring and research of the “Everyone Digital” action plan from the Flemish government. This assignment was commissioned by ABB (the Flemish department of domestic governance) and is conducted in collaboration with research group imec-smit-vub. The objective is to monitor, evaluate and support current digital inclusion actions and policies set-up by local and regional authorities and social and educational organizations.