About the project
Becoming a parent may bring joy and fulfilment, but adversities and excessive demands may cause reduced wellbeing and both mental and physical health problems. Throughout the childrearing years, mothers have excess risk of work absence, illness, and care-related stressors impacting their future health and economic security. This project adopts an interdisciplinary and exposure-wide developmental approach to provide causal knowledge on the pathways to maternal wellbeing and examine gendered trajectories. We particularly focus on social relations and genetic influences. Good social relations may counteract and modify risks inherent in adversity. Social relations are modifiable factors that may be optimal targets for health promotive and illness preventive efforts. We study the dynamic relations between wellbeing and illbeing over time, the role of relationship quality, violence and abuse, and sources of stability and change in wellbeing.
Objectives
The project aims to delineate associations between wellbeing (life satisfaction, positive affect, relationship satisfaction) and illbeing (anxiety, depression) across time. Further, we study mechanisms involved in associations between adversities and wellbeing to identify resilience promoting factors.
Outcomes
The project capitalizes on cutting-edge methods and leverages unique longitudinal and genetically informative data over 20 years in the Mother, Father and Child Cohort study. The data include a total of N>95,000 mothers, with children and partners, and genotyping, and provide opportunities to model longitudinal developments, gene-environment interplay, control for genetic confounding, and for testing of causality. As a result, we will provide a reliable decision-making basis for practitioners and policy-makers to formulate informed strategies to address women's health and quality of life.
Collaboration
The project is based at PROMENTA Research Center, at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, and is part of the ‘Quality of Life in Families’ project. National and international researchers in the fields of Psychology, Sociology, Demography, Econometrics, and Genetics are involved. We also collaborate with the WHO Healthy Cities Network in Norway. Other key partnerships include the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Viken County.
Financing
The project is financed by the Research Council of Norway (#320709).