New Mindhood PdD student, Maria Keilow
Maria Keilow has joined the Mindhood team as our new PhD student. Maria's research will address ADHD from a social interaction perspective
Maria Keilow's project addresses the social perspectives of ADHD and proposes to investigate some of the mechanisms underlying the unequal social distribution of mental health and its consequences. The project will contribute to current research by an interdisciplinary approach building on previous research and methodology from sociology, econometrics and health sciences.
Using Danish register data, we first investigate and describe the variation in ADHD diagnosis and medical treatment across socioeconomic strata. Second, we investigate to what extent the associations between ADHD (diagnosis or symptom scores) and family socioeconomic resources influence academic outcomes of diagnosed children and compare effects in early versus later school grades. We will test to what extend the phenotypic behavior, the diagnosis and medical treatment interacts with socioeconomic resources in shaping academic achievement. Third, we investigate the academic achievement measures of siblings and classroom peers of children with ADHD to study social and combined social and family effects.
Social and health research agree that socioeconomic factors are associated with mental health, yet less is known about underlying interaction mechanisms or cumulative effects over the childhood. ADHD is the most prevalent diagnosed mental health problem and characterized by problems with attention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. The number of diagnosed and medically treated children has increased over the past decades and we have limited knowledge about the causes and consequences of this development.
The PhD is a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project between VIVE – The Danish Centre of Applied Social Science and Mindhood at Aarhus University.
About Maria Keilow
I am a PhD student and my main field of interest is children with ADHD and, in broader terms, the social and socioeconomic aspects of mental health.
I have a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen and have since worked with social and educational research first at the Centre for Strategic Research in Education (DPU) at Aarhus University and since then at SFI – The Danish National Centre for Social Research (now VIVE – the Danish Centre of Applied Social Science)
My previous research also includes developing and validating student well-being measures, evaluating classroom interventions using RCT designs, and studying the effect of medical ADHD treatment on student academic achievement.