*Disclaimer: Please note that parts of this English sci-fly were automatically translated.*
Our bloggers Kirsten van Hooijdonk and Levie Karssen successfully defended their doctoral theses – congratulations! On Thursday, August 28, 2025, Kirsten van Hooijdonk defended her dissertation “Mind Your Health”: Unravelling University Students’ Health Behaviour and Well-Being. On Tuesday, September 2, 2025, Levie Karssen successfully defended her dissertation Parenting support 2.0 for vulnerable families: Can an app and website support parents in raising their young children in a healthy way? In this post, we will share with you the most important findings of their doctoral research.
“Mind Your Health”: Unravelling University Students’ Health Behaviour and Well-Being
Health-risk behaviours, such as unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, excessive alcohol or drug use, problematic internet use and sleep deprivation, are common among university students. Health-risk behaviours are associated with negative health outcomes and can therefore have adverse effects on long-term health. Therefore, it is important to help students develop sustainable health behaviours. Up-to-date insights are needed to support this. This dissertation therefore focuses on examining 1) the current state of university students’ health behaviours, 2) which socio-demographic factors were associated with these health behaviours, and 3) the relation between health behaviours and well-being.
The results confirmed that health-risk behaviours were common, with alcohol and drug use and problematic internet use standing out most negatively. Socio-demographic factors such as gender, living situation, financial situation and type of student (international/regular) were consistently linked to students’ health behaviours. Furthermore, health behaviours were found to be associated with student well-being at one point in time, but no clear evidence was found for over time or causal relationships. The findings of this dissertation may help guide the development of interventions and policies to support students in establishing sustainable health behaviours and reducing the risk of future disease.
Kirsten van Hooijdonk (1995) obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Biomedical Sciences at Radboud University, specializing in epidemiology and consultancy. In 2020, she started her PhD research, aimed at better understanding (the relations between) students’ health behaviour and well-being. For this, she used a large-scale longitudinal survey study conducted among university students. Kirsten is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University.
Parenting support 2.0 for vulnerable families: Can an app and website support parents in raising their young children in a healthy way?
Growing up healthy is becoming increasingly important and difficult in today’s society. This is particularly true for children in vulnerable families, who are at greater risk of lifestyle-related diseases and face more barriers to a healthy lifestyle. Digital tools that are attractive and easy to use could support parents in raising their children healthily in a fun and accessible way. We therefore investigated whether we could help parents to encourage their children to eat healthily, sleep well and exercise using an app and website.
No convincing evidence of the effectiveness of the digital tools was found: parents who received digital parenting support showed no change in the way they dealt with eating, sleeping and exercise. Nor did the development of their children differ from that of children whose parents did not receive parenting support. However, we did identify important areas for improvement in existing and future digital parenting programmes. According to parents, such programmes should be more personalised, tailored to the rapidly changing needs of parents and their growing children, better suited to family circumstances (such as families with multiple children) and flexible in the way the programme is offered (both digitally via different platforms and non-digitally).
Levie Karssen (Ede, 1993) studied Educational Sciences at Radboud University (2014) and then completed the Research Master’s programme in Behavioural Science (2016) at the same university. During this programme, she discovered her interest in promoting the well-being and health of children and young people and in developing and evaluating (digital) interventions to achieve this. These interests led to the start of her PhD research in 2017 into the development and effectiveness of the Samen Happie! app and website to promote healthy parenting of young children. Since 2020, Levie has been happily combining this research with teaching in the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Educational Sciences, and she will continue to work as a lecturer in these programmes after completing her PhD.
Leave a Reply