Resiliency @ Work: Digitally augmented mentoring for better health among immigrant youth

Everybody needs someone to see them and care about their well-being.

This is especially true for immigrant youth who face unique challenges in life.

Anxiety and depression is an increasing problem for all youth in Norway, including immigrant youth. Having a supportive network can make the difference in whether these types of problems lead to school drop-out, unemployment and more chronic mental health disabilities.

What can be done?

Deede Gammon is a senior researcher at Oslo University Hospital, and also holds a position at the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research.

Gammon and her team have received Research Council of Norway’s HELSEVEL innovation funding to develop a health promoting platform to engage immigrant youth. The team’s main user collaborator is Catalysts who runs a mentoring program for immigrant youth and their mentors (volunteer adults).

As a point of departure, the project builds on the ‘ReConnect’ platform and related research, as well as research into mentoring.

Preliminary findings about what immigrant youth and their mentors need and want from a revised platform will be presented at the EHiN conference in Oslo, in November. Following the planned pilot in 2019 the team hopes to gain additional funding for a large-scale study of the effects of the digitally enhanced mentoring program on school dropout rates, employment and mental health resiliency over an 18-month period.

Don’t miss out on the new e-health research at EHiN! We hope to meet many of you there.