Kjærsti Thorsteinsen has a strong background in psychology, holding a PhD in Psychology (2018) as well as a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Psychology (2006, 2009) from UiT The Arctic University of Norway. In addition, she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (2014). Following her PhD, she completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at UiT (2019–2022), focusing on the relationship between voluntary engagement and wellbeing.
Her research has primarily addressed motivation, subjective experiences, and different dimensions of wellbeing and quality of life, with projects examining physical activity, goal attainment, volunteering, and charitable giving. More recently, her work has increasingly focused on issues highly relevant to children’s and adolescents’ mental health, but she has also contributed on projects on gender and masculinity, equality, violence in close relationships, refugee health, public health, and co-production in welfare and health services. These research areas reflect a strong interest in the social, psychological, and structural conditions that shape mental health and wellbeing throughout life.
Methodologically, Thorsteinsen’s main expertise lies in quantitative research. She has extensive experience with psychological experiments, (intensive) longitudinal designs (e.g., experience sampling), cross-sectional studies, RCTs and register-based data analyses—approaches that are particularly well suited to studying developmental processes and mental health trajectories in children and young people. She also has some experience with qualitative methods, which complements her quantitative work by enabling deeper insight into lived experiences.
