Baojing Li is a PhD student at the Department of Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University. Her research, as part of the Grandchildren of misfortune: The role of resilience for multigenerational patterns of inequality (GRAM) project, is centered on investigating inequalities in social conditions and mental health that are transmitted across multiple generations from grandparents to grandchildren.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your academic background and what led you to pursue a PhD?
I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in global health. During my bachelor’s, I developed a strong research interest in mental health inequalities by focusing on mental health of minority groups such as prison medical workers and LGBTQ+ populations. When I studied for my master’s and worked as a research assistant at Karolinska Institutet, I recommitted myself to continuing mental health inequality research through investigating the intra- and inter-generational associations between educational level and mental health using a register-based approach. The doctoral project at Stockholm University allows me to go a step further in inequality research to explore the reproduction of inequalities in social conditions and mental health across multiple generations.
Q: What is the focus of your PhD thesis?
I focus on the multigenerational associations and mechanisms between socioeconomic and psychosocial disadvantages, as well as mental health problems from a gender perspective.
Q: What are some of the key questions your research is addressing?
One of the key questions I am addressing now in the second part of my thesis is to explore risk and protective factors in the family and school context among the parental generation, reflective of both vulnerability and resilience, that may help further explain the continuity and discontinuity in the associations between grandparental socioeconomic disadvantages and grandchild mental health problems. Particularly in my study IV, I am trying to zoom into the parental generation to understand whether their childhood factors played a relevant role for the mediation effect we found in study III that parental adulthood psychosocial disadvantages fully mediate the association between grandparental socioeconomic disadvantages and grandchild mental health disorders. I went to a research visit at University College London this October to work on my study IV with professor Ingrid Schoon, whose key research interests lie in the study of risk and resilience.
Q: How do you hope your research will contribute to the field?
I hope my research sheds light on tackling specific domains of disadvantages that may be important for mitigating social inequalities in mental health across generations.
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Baojing Li
PhD student in Public Health Sciences
Centre for Health Equity Studies (CHESS)
Department of Public Health Sciences
Stockholm University
University profile | ResearchGate profile