Improving research on adolescent mental health in Sweden by collaboration with the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth and learning from its extensive experiences and profound body of knowledge

Two overarching themes will guide the stay as visiting researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute (TKI) in Perth, Australia.Firstly: Measurement of adolescent mental health. This theme concerns fundamental issues of measurement that challenges research on adolescent mental health.

Because of methodological uncertainties, it has been proven difficult to explain the observed changes of adolescent mental health during the past few decades. One reason is that many surveys solely collect data on symptoms, lacking data about consequences for everyday life.

Recent Swedish adolescent mental health studies confirm the importance of inclusion of indicators of impairment as well as symptom counts and frequency.

The intention is to take advantage of the fact that TKI has extensive experiences in the research field that will add and contribute to my current work on this topic.

I will work together with researchers at TKI aiming at examining and improving a preexisting severity/impairment scale using Rasch Measurement Theory. The results will be reported in a peer-reviewed journal.Secondly: Longitudinal analysis of adolescent mental health. This theme concerns challenges in longitudinal studies.

The purpose is to learn from the extensive experiences of such studies that TKI has gathered during a long period of time, in order to transfer its great body of knowledge into my own research in Sweden.

This theme will directly provide advanced research skills necessary for the forthcoming research project at the University of Gothenburg on “Children´s and adolescents´ responses to the pandemic–future risks of increasing inequalities in learning and mental health”, which recently was awarded funding from NordForsk.

Issues that will be focused include challenges in combining survey data and register data, methods that can be used to handle decreasing number of participants, how to measure social determinants over the life course and ethical issues in longitudinal research.