The Selection Committee has nominated Prof Meiring to spend an exchange period of one month with Prof Rens van de Schoot at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The EUROSA project is an Erasmus Mundus Action 2 Partnerships scholarship programme, funded by the European Commission. It is coordinated by the University of Antwerp and it promotes mobility for students, researchers, academic and administrative staff from South Africa to Europe. It offers mobility grants to 70 South African master’s students, doctoral researchers and staff to spend a period abroad at one of the partner institutions.

The European partner universities include: the University of Antwerp, Aarhus University (Denmark), the University of Bologna (Italy), the University of Graz (Austria), the University of Leipzig (Germany), the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Lund University (Sweden), Maastricht University (Netherlands), and Utrecht University (Netherlands).

The South African partners are: Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the University of Fort Hare, the University of the Free State, the University of Limpopo, the University of Pretoria, Stellenbosch University, the University of Venda and the University of the Western Cape.

The partnership is supported by four associated partners: the International Education Association of South Africa (IEASA), the Southern African-Nordic Centre (SANORD), the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) and the Utrecht Network.

Prof Deon Meiring holds an associate professorship position in the Department of Human Resource Management of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at the University of Pretoria. Prof Meiring completed his PhD at the Tilburg University in the Netherlands in 2007. The topic of his thesis was “Bias and Equivalence of Psychological Measures in South Africa”. Prof Meiring’s research interest falls within the field of cross-cultural psychology and most of his research focuses on one or more of the following categories: (1) Personality measurement in the workplace; (2) cross-cultural assessment; (3) personnel selection in industrial and organisational psychology, and (4) applied cross-cultural methodology.

In a multicultural society such as South Africa, social research often involves problems that investigate the relationship between individuals, groups and organisations. Generally, the individual and the social groups are conceptualised as a hierarchical system of individuals and groups, with individuals and groups defined as separate levels of hierarchical systems. New advances in the field of statistical methods use multilevel analysis to analyse such hierarchical systems.

Prof Meiring will be visiting Prof Rens van de Schoot, one of the main researchers and teachers of multilevel analysis in the world, at the Department of Methodology and Statistics at the Utrecht University in August 2012 to collaborate on specific research projects where advanced statistical consultation is necessary.

One of the projects that they will focus on is the South African Personality Project. Prof Meiring will also attend the advanced course in Mplus (S23), a special workshop featuring Mplus Version 7, and the international Mplus user meeting to assist in the development of skills and knowledge in the analysis of complex models.

Prof Meiring’s ultimate goal with this visit is to enhance collaboration and joint research exchange with the Department of Methodology and Statistics of Utrecht University. The ultimate outcome will be joint publications in high-impact journals.