Karen Margrethe Dahl

Areas of work

Karen Margrethe Vendelbo Dahl works broadly with analyses related to children, adolescents and families. She has knowledge of and an interest in families’ circumstances and practices: What is the composition of Danish families? How do we raise our children? How are children’s relationships with their family and their peers? And what does the family mean for children and adolescents’ well-being, development and risk behaviour? The majority of the analyses are based on VIVE’s child development surveys ”Årgang 95” and ”Børn og Unge i Danmark”.

In the past three years, she has worked closely with analyses in the area of family law: categorisation of state administration cases, implementation and efficacy evaluation of interventions targeted at divorced parents, and measuring of parents’ satisfaction with and benefit of case treatment in the family law system.

Furthermore, in recent years Karen Margrethe Vendelbo Dahl has worked with the subject of adolescents’ sexuality – including relationships between resources during upbringing, sexuality and well-being.

A side interest is vulnerable children and adolescents in Greenland. In relation to this, she has recently evaluated an institution for adolescents in placement, and she hopes to get more assignments on the conditions and well-being of children in placement in the future.

Methods

Her work is mainly quantitative, and she has extensive experience with design and collection of large questionnaire surveys and analysis of registry data. This applies for both VIVE’s broad population surveys, involving almost 6,000 children and parents, and smaller surveys of specific target groups, such as parents in the Danish State Administration. When it comes to qualitative work, she has recently carried out smaller interview surveys and analysed existing case data.

Background

Karen Margrethe Vendelbo Dahl acquired a master’s degree in Sociology in 2004 and has worked at SFI, first as a student assistant from 2000 to 2004, and then in regular employment from 2004 to 2008. Following a brief employment at the consultancy firm New Insight in 2008, Karen Margrethe Vendelbo Dahl returned to SFI (now VIVE) as a PhD student in 2009 and was fully employed after completing my PhD in 2014.