Monday 16 June 2025 Juul Henkens will defend her doctoral thesis entitled ‘It moves you: The relationship between adolescent residential mobility and wellbeing‘ at the University of Groningen.
Moving during adolescence is a significant life event. Beyond the stress of the move itself, adolescents must adapt to a new home, a different neighborhood, and build new social connections. In this already turbulent phase, where physical and mental developments takes place and friendships play a crucial role, a residential move can be especially disruptive.
This dissertation studies the relationship between residential mobility in adolescence and wellbeing and residential mobility in later life. Large-scale quantitative longitudinal data from Germany and the Netherlands, and unique international qualitative data from a highly mobile population are used to study the effects of adolescent residential mobility from a lifecourse perspective. The findings show that moving in adolescence can be stressful and disruptive for wellbeing. However, the impact of a residential move is not universal, but depends on the complex interplay between moving characteristics, social context, and prior moving experiences.
This research was conducted at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW) as part of the project “Migrant youth mobility in Europe: patterns, processes and consequences (MYMOVE)”, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 819298).
For more information on the PhD defence see the University of Groningen website.
