The mental health of young people, especially since the pandemic, is under scrutiny. PhD student Kayla Green (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences) prefers to look at the well-being of young people. Together with young people, she developed an approach to better measure well-being. Young people experience a lot of school-related stress, and financial stress has also been found to be a predictor of reduced well-being.
Why do you think it is important to do research on young people's well-being?
'Well-being and mental health are often mixed up to some degree. Well-being is more of an umbrella term that also covers mental health. For example, well-being also deals with physical health, social relationships and emotional well-being. Looking at well-being provides a more complete picture of young people's experiences and challenges. I also think it is important to understand not only the problems, but also the positive aspects of life. Well-being helps us see what makes young people happy and what motivates them.'
How can you measure well-being when it encompasses so much?
'My dissertation is a quest to find this out. Well-being can be quite an abstract concept and what is important for your well-being now may be different in twenty years. That’s why I think it is very important to let young people set their own definition of well-being. I organised brainstorming sessions where young people could give their lives a rating from 1 to 10. They could then write down on Post-it Notes what they were thinking about when they rated their lives. This helped to identify the different themes involved in well-being. I already had a questionnaire based on the literature, which I increasingly supplemented in sessions like this with the ideas of young people.'
And what did the young people write on those Post-it Notes?
'Of course, family and friends were often mentioned, which didn't surprise me that much. Some young people also wrote down that feeling safe in their environment was important to them. What surprised me the most was that almost all young people reported experiencing stress and performance pressure related to school. Previous research has shown that performance pressure has increased, but I did not expect this to be reflected so clearly here.'
You also looked at well-being during the pandemic. What are your findings?
'In May 2020, we started a two-week journal study in which young adolescents (10-17 years) and young adults (18-25 years) filled in questionnaires. The study focussed on feelings of tension and depression, but also feelings of strength. We repeated this every six months. We saw that as the pandemic progressed, the negative feelings increased. We also saw that young people who have less support at home, for example because they did not have proper resources for homeschooling, suffered more mood swings. We also found that young adolescents had feelings of depression less often than young adults. We think this has to do with the exciting phase this group is often in, for instance, moving into student accommodation or starting their first job.'
Are you concerned about the well-being of young people?
'You hear many alarming things about the well-being of young people, but fortunately, the group with whom things are going well is by far the largest. People go through a lot of changes between the ages of ten and twenty-five, both in their brain and in their behaviour. So it is not surprising that young people have mood swings, for example. They go through many changes, but that does not automatically mean that they suffer long-time effects or that they need help in this regard. What I would find interesting for follow-up research is to see how you could pay attention to mental health in school in a different way. Namely, without immediately labelling "deviant" behaviour or considering it to be a problem. Nobody feels good twenty-four hours a day, and the down moments are just part of life.'
You also did brain research. What did this reveal?
'In my fMRI study, I looked at the brain activity of young people in relation to their well-being. They performed certain tasks while lying in an MRI scanner. For example, I found evidence that certain brain regions, such as those related to social interactions, are more active in young people when they think about family relationships. Only 35 young people participated, so it is still exploratory research. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting basis to further explore how well-being and brain development are related.'
Financial stress correlates with reduced well-being. What can you tell about that?
'Financial stress appears to be a strong predictor of reduced well-being. This is stronger than objective standards, such as socioeconomic status, which is what many other studies look at. Simply put, it's not just about what kind of house you live in or how often you go on holiday, but mainly about how you experience poverty. Young people who experience financial worries not only report lower well-being, but also more negative future prospects. This shows that how young people subjectively perceive their situation often gives a better picture of how serious the situation is than a figure indicating whether someone grows up in a rich or poor family.'
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Kayla Green is part of the Erasmus-SYNC lab, which also founded the YoungXperts platform. One of its aims is to make the voices of young people heard and integrate their perspectives on topics that affect them and social issues into research projects. On 31 October, she will be defending her dissertation entitled 'Developing and thriving in a changing world'. Her supervisor is Eveline Crone.
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