STEVENS, GONNEKE

Gonneke Stevens is a Professor of Adolescent Health & Wellbeing at Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University. As a researcher, project leader, and program leader, she has designed, conducted, and led research on when, why, and how adolescent (mental) health and well-being vary as a function of proximal and distal contexts. These contexts range from family and peer relationships, young peoples’ socioeconomic position and migration background, and the school and neighborhood to the country context. In doing so, she considers adolescents’ strengths and weaknesses as well as contextual affordances and risk factors. In her research, she also examines time trends in adolescent (mental) health and well-being. She integrates complementary methods: large-scale, cross-sectional, internationally comparative research, clinical interview studies, longitudinal research, and qualitative and experimental methods. Topics she has focused on in her research concern migration and diversity, social inequality, risk behavior, and trust, often, but not exclusively, in relation to (mental) health and wellbeing. For example, her Ph.D. project was one of the first representative epidemiological studies on the mental health of immigrant children in Europe. Since 2016, she has been the principal investigator of the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study in the Netherlands, a large-scale WHO collaborative cross-national study conducted in approximately 50 countries in Europe. She is the scientific coordinator of the interdisciplinary hub ‘YOUth Got Talent’ aimed at optimizing youth’s potential for social participation, health, and wellbeing. This project focuses (among others) on the importance of future expectations, trust, and societal fairness for mental health and school dropout in MBO students. She is a member of the TRAILS management team. TRAILS is an ongoing longitudinal and multidisciplinary cohort study on the psychological, social, and physical development of adolescents and young adults. Finally, she is the co-project leader of a large-scale study on poverty and youth mental health from a systems perspective.