What we do
About our project
Background Around 13-25% of adolescents suffer from depression or anxiety and numbers rise, because of the rapidly changing world, societal challenges, and major crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Youth mental health problems have a substantial impact on daily life and predict adult mental health outcomes, indicating the importance of early detection and prevention. Currently, youth mental health problems are treated once they emerge. However, due to shortage of health-care professionals, it can take up to several years to be diagnosed and receive adequate treatment. A novel approach is needed to safeguard the mental health of youth in a sustainable way.
 Objective Prevention should be accessible before problems emerge, and insights in protective factors, like resilience are needed. However, progress in research to understand the mechanisms of resilience in daily life is hindered by the lack of measurements that capture the dynamic nature of resilience. Furthermore, youth themselves have not been included in developing measures. The key objective of this project is to improve our insights into the mechanisms of resilience in daily life, by improving and developing daily resilience measures in collaboration with adolescents and young adults.
The project
- In order to improve the measurement of resilience in youth, this project will combine three methodologies in different phases.
- A systematic review of the literature is conducted to detect existing measures of dynamic resilience in daily life assessed in Experience Sampling Method (ESM) studies,
- In co-creation sessions with adolescents and young adults we discuss the elements of existing measures and co-create new or improved measures,
- In a pilot ESM study embedded in the Convergence PROTECt ME consortium, adolescents and young adults participate in a 7-day ESM study to test and validate our novel resilience measure(s).
Our research focus
Measuring Resilience in Daily Life
In addition to major life events, adolescents frequently encounter daily stressors - such as a disagreement with a friend or being excluded from a social activity. These events are part of everyday life. While some adolescents recover quickly, others struggle to bounce back. The way young people respond to these day-to-day challenges is a significant predictor of their resilience to more severe stressors. In other words, understanding the “ordinary magic” of resilience in daily life may help us better support youth today, by strengthening their ability to cope with larger challenges in the future.
Experience Sampling Method
Daily experiences and responses can be effectively measured using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). With ESM, adolescents receive short questionnaires on their smartphones several times a day, reporting how they feel, where they are, and what they are doing. This approach provides snapshots of well-being and recovery throughout the day - like a sequence of photographs capturing the flow of everyday life. Building on these methodological advances, this project leverages moment-to-moment data on emotions, stress, and recovery to develop dynamic measures of resilience tailored to the realities of daily adolescent life.
Funds & Grants
This research is funded by a grant from the Stichting Erasmus Trustfonds awarded to L.P. de Vries [97030.2023.102.114/189/RB] and is part of the PROTECt ME project funded by Convergence, the alliance between Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Delft University of Technology.
Publications
- Resilience in daily life: a systematic review of measures and associations with well-being and mental health in experience sampling studies. (2024), Zietse, J., Keijsers, L., Hillegers, M., Vreeker, A., Van Harmelen, A., & de Vries, L. P. doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9yudb.
Our team
- dr. Annabel Vreeker.
- Prof. Loes Keijsers.
- Susanne van der Ree.
