January 15, 2025 | News | Congratulations
Maria Gültzow Obtained Her Doctorate

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On December 11, 2024, Maria Gültzow from the Social Demography Department successfully defended her doctoral thesis on “Digging Deeper: Exploring mechanisms underlying subgroup variation in mental health” at Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam.
In her dissertation Maria Gültzow gains a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms that contribute to subgroup differences in mental health.
Not everyone has good mental health, and despite a lot of research, differences in mental health between groups of people continue. This dissertation aimed to better understand why these differences exist.

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The study looked at different factors that could explain why some groups have better or worse mental health, including things we can change, like health behaviors, obesity, and income, as well as things we cannot change, like genetics. Two main mechanisms were explored: differential exposure and differential impact. Differential exposure means that mental health differences may be due to some groups being more exposed to harmful factors, while differential impact means that certain groups are more affected by these factors than others.
The study found that differences in mental health are partly due to the unequal exposure to factors that we can change, but how much they matter depends on the specific factors, the underlying intervention and the group being studied. The role of differential impact is less clear and harder to measure, but it might be related to exposure to these factors.
In conclusion, to reduce mental health differences between groups, we need to focus not only on helping individuals who are struggling, but also on changing the larger social and economic systems that contribute to these disparities.
Maria was part of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a doctoral program that combines demography, epidemiology and data science. The dissertation was supervised by Frank van Lenthe, Mikko Myrskylä and Maarten J Bijlsma.
Related Publications
Gueltzow, M.; Bijlsma, M. J.; van Lenthe, F. J.; Myrskylä, M.:
Social Science and Medicine 332:116100, 1–9. (2023)

Gueltzow, M.; Lahtinen, H.; Bijlsma, M. J.; Myrskylä, M.; Martikainen, P.:
Social Science and Medicine 351:116992, 1–8. (2024)

Gueltzow, M.; Oude Groeniger, J.; Bijlsma, M. J.; Jansen , P. W.; Houweling, T. A. J.; van Lenthe, F. J.:
Annals of Epidemiology 94, 19–26. (2024)
