So that’s how it can go. She herself did not feel like it at all, says Loes Keijsers. She was 14 when her parents usually had to drag her along on family outings with great difficulty. When it came time for a holiday photo, she rolled her eyes and posed reluctantly. The funny thing: her twin sister Karen, with identical DNA and therefore exactly the same predisposition, was just delighted with the family outings and holiday snaps.
Keijsers (39) also told the story more than a month ago, when she was sworn in as professor of orthopedagogy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. It typifies her mission: she finally wants to understand how children differ from each other and what that means for them during puberty, a period in which they discover who they are. Until now, parenting research has not been able to answer these questions, but with new apps and measurements it should be possible to follow adolescents from moment to moment and thus test all kinds of classic parenting theories: do they work for everyone?
What will those apps do differently from the previous research?
‘We are going to get a very detailed picture of the situations in which adolescents find themselves and how they feel about it. The app gives a signal several times a day to answer a few short questions. How do you feel? Are you angry or happy now? Who are you with? That is something that psychiatrists already do with patients, for example to discover whether someone gets a headache as a result of sports or whether someone first gets a headache and therefore less sports. You can also discover such patterns with how an adolescent feels in a certain way and why.’
Will that yield results that were not possible with traditional research?
‘Most research among adolescents and families gives average answers by distributing questionnaires to as many families as possible. Only averages don’t say much if you know that one adolescent is not the other. For example, we recently conducted a questionnaire study among young people with media researcher Patti Valkenburg about their use of social media during the corona crisis. The net effect was zero on average, but in reality 46 percent felt better after using social media and 10 percent felt worse.’
You’ve been doing the app research among families for a few years now. Are there already exciting results coming out?
‘There is a classical parenting theory that states that children are less likely to experience depressive feelings if they receive support from their parents during a conversation. That might be average. But we never actually had the opportunity to test to what extent this really applies as a general principle. In our research we now see that after a contact moment in which the parents gave support, roughly 40 percent of the young people indeed feel better a few hours later, but that about 20 percent actually feel worse. We do not yet know exactly why this is the case, but they are important insights, because puberty is everyone’s growing up. window of opportunity†
All these measurements can be linked together in a number of ways. How do you avoid drowning in the data or making fake discoveries?
‘We put all our plans and the things we want to know online in advance. We therefore immediately limit the type of measurements and answers that we collect via the app. That’s called pre-registration. That way we can’t browse through the data. It is also unethical to ask more of people than is necessary.’
Speaking of which: are adolescents actually waiting for daily questionnaires?
‘As a scientist you should not simply impose all kinds of things. In our study, we first asked the adolescents what they themselves would like and what they need. And then it turns out that they themselves also like to look back on how they feel at certain moments and would like to see that reflected in a kind of diary later on. So we also printed hundreds of booklets looking back at their time with the app and how they felt.
“We also keep them motivated with gaming principles and rewards. Together with the young people, we continue to come up with new things that they enjoy doing.’
In your inaugural lecture you say that you also want to help young people with apps. How does that work?
‘We developed an app, Grow It!, in which adolescents could monitor their own mood and play all kinds of ‘challenges’. They get to see in which circumstances and with which people they feel good and also when they feel less good. We launched the app during the corona crisis with approximately two thousand young people. They have started to feel better – against the trend – in a year and a half. We don’t really know for sure whether it’s because of the app. We will investigate this with a control group.’
You are also talking about prevention, to relieve the burden on professional help requests in youth care. Are the benefits really that great?
‘An app like this only costs a few euros per young person. We still have to investigate it, but if, for example, only a handful of those two thousand children have not had to use youth care because of the app, you may have a cost-effective intervention in the future.’