International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health | An Interview with the Authors—Prof. Dr. Kimberly Mitchell and Prof. Dr. Victoria Banyard

Name: Prof. Dr. Kimberly Mitchell
Affiliations: Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA
Interests: adolescent health; adolescent sexual behavior; at risk/high risk populations (health); child abuse/neglect; child/maternal health; cyberbullying; firearms/guns; hate/hate crime/hate speech; opiates/opioids; resilience; suicide; trauma; violence prevention

Name: Prof. Dr. Victoria Banyard
Affiliations: New Brunswick School of Social Work, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
Interests: interpersonal violence; sexual violence; dating violence; adolescence

“The Contribution of Social and Structural Determinants of Health Deficits to Mental and Behavioral Health Among a Diverse Group of Young People”
by Kimberly J. Mitchell, Victoria Banyard and Deirdre Colburn
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2025, 22(7), 1013; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22071013
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/7/1013

The following is a short interview with Prof. Dr. Kimberly Mitchell and Prof. Dr. Victoria Banyard:

1. Congratulations on your recent publication. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your current research focus?

Kimberly Mitchell: Sure. My name is Kimberly Mitchell. I’m a research professor at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and I’ve been working in this field for about 30 years. I’ve done work, more broadly, with child victimization and adversity, and more recently, I’ve started moving towards suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

Victoria Banyard: And I’m Vicki Banyard. I’m a distinguished professor in the School of Social Work and at the Center for Research on ending violence at Rutgers New Brunswick in New Jersey. I’ve been in the field, similar to Kim, for about 30 years, and have been working with her for a number of years. My research is very centered on violence prevention and particularly studying resilience-based strategies, which include understanding bystander intervention and mobilization across a number of different types of violence, and looking at bystander intervention as well as looking at strengths and risk factors related to mental health.

2. Your recent joint study highlights the social and structural determinants affecting young people’s mental health. What would you say are the most overlooked “invisible” determinants in this field, and how do you think we can make them more visible?

Kimberly Mitchell: You know, we know a lot about individual-level risk, and I think we know less about the larger community and societal-level factors that influence and interact with that risk. And that was one of our motivations for working on this paper, in particular, in the context of different health risk behaviours that are really critical to adolescents and young adults right now.

Victoria Banyard: As Kim said, we tend to focus very much on aspects of the individual. We see a lot of analysis of demographic groupings without really unpacking what that means. And I think measuring the social determinants of health in a more fine-grained way helps us to unpack what some of the Community social structural kinds of factors are impacting mental health. And I think we need to study that much more. And I think with this paper, we started that by particularly looking at risk factors. I think in the future, we need to do a lot more to also measure strength as not just the inverse of risk or lack of risk, but strengths in and of themselves. And that’s something for the future.

Kimberly Mitchell: I think it’s also important to add that there is a growing body of literature looking at social and structural determinants of health. A lot of them utilize external kinds of secondary county-level or state-level constructs, which are super important. And what we did in this study is we really looked around to see if there was a way we could ask these questions directly of youth, and we had a hard time finding them. Typically, they’re asked in clinical settings of adults or they’re asked of parents about their children. So, we took those types of screening tools and we adapted them in such a way that would be meaningful to youth. And then we pilot tested them with youth. So it’s also that this paper is exciting to us because it’s the first time we’ve really put some of that stuff out there and shown that kids can answer these questions and how important this is to look at!

Victoria Banyard: I would just add one thing on to that, that the other piece of what I think is novel and exciting to us about this paper is using the latent class analysis to not only, as Kim said, measure a whole variety of social determinants of health, but really trying to see how they go together in different profiles and I think that’s been really interesting. You know, sometimes people may just measure one of the social determinants of health and look at, say, the impact of poverty or income, right? Or they might investigate a variety of them, but what we were also really trying to do was look at: how do these things group together into different profiles of experiences that young people may have, and how we can understand how that affects their mental health?

3. With the development of technology, the impact factors like social media on the mental health of teenagers has become a very important topic. So how would you suggest we equip young people to navigate online risks like cyberbullying while still maximizing digital opportunities? How do you think we could use digital tools to bridge, rather than replace, the human-centered care in the field of mental health?

Kimberly Mitchell: Yeah, I feel like so much research on technology and kids has been negative, and there are certainly risks out there. But we know that there are a lot of great benefits to kids, too. You know, there are whole populations of kids that are otherwise hard to reach, but they’re online. Reaching out to them this way is a way to have their voices heard and their experiences shared. So I think, more and more, there are prevention programs, there are data methodologies where it’s all moved online because that’s where kids are.

4. What advice would you give to early career researchers aiming to make an impact in adolescent health?

Victoria Banyard: I would say study strengths and study context. Don’t just focus on the individual and what attitudes and things may be going on inside their heads. That’s important to understand. But I think we need to keep understanding and bridging disciplines to really look at both what’s going on inside the individual and what is happening around them. And as I said before, to measure strengths in their own right rather than just the inverse of risk. So, I think that’s an important future direction.

5. Our last question is what motivated you to choose the IJERPH journal for your submission, and how did you find the submission process?

Kimberly Mitchell: We’ve published there before. I think Vicki was actually on the Editorial Board for a while. So, we’ve heard good things about it. The journal has published a lot of great information in diverse areas; going back to what Vicki was speaking about, areas that cross disciplines. And I feel like the journal does a good job with that. And in terms of the whole submission process, I thought it was pretty straightforward. I thought the Editors were very responsive. I appreciated having the template to work from; that was really helpful because I think it reduces a lot of the back and forth once it’s accepted.

Victoria Banyard: Yeah, I thought so. As Kim said, you know, we published with you all before, I was an Editorial Board Member for a bit, and I think the turnaround time is also pretty amazing. I mean, we did get very helpful comments from reviewers, but also, just the timeframe is really quite quick compared to other places.

Kimberly Mitchell: Yeah. I also appreciate that there are a lot of Special Issues. I think that draws a lot of people in.

We sincerely thank Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Banyard for sharing their invaluable insights on adolescent mental health, social determinants, and innovative research approaches. Their groundbreaking work in developing youth-centered assessment tools and examining contextual factors provides crucial direction for the field. We wish them continued success in their important contributions to violence prevention and child wellbeing research.