When Dr Stephanie Heß enters Building 40 at the University of Magdeburg in the morning, she still feels the same enthusiasm she did when she was a student. “I’m paid to explore questions that fascinate me, and I get to pass on this knowledge to students as well,” she says. For the social scientist from the Chair of General Sociology / Macrosociology at the University of Magdeburg, research is not a job, but a vocation. She first discovered her fascination for topics such as family research, life satisfaction and social inequalities whilst studying social sciences at the University of Rostock.
After graduating, Stephanie initially began working in pharmaceutical market research. However, her thoughts continued to revolve around family research and social inequalities. In particular, she could not shake the idea that a child’s life course and opportunities are strongly shaped by their family. It was clear to Hess that a change was needed. So, in 2017, she began her doctoral qualification at the Faculty of Humanities to investigate how family circumstances affect children’s well-being.
During her research, Stephanie Heß noticed that when it comes to children’s well-being, it is often only the parents who are surveyed, not the children themselves. The problem is that parents project their own well-being onto their children whilst simultaneously overestimating the extent to which their own well-being affects the child. “Yet children make up 15% of European society and have just as much a right to be heard in satisfaction research.” This motivated Heß to give children a voice in her work, allowing them to speak for themselves about their well-being. In her dissertation “Family Matters: A Multisystem Investigation of Children’s Subjective Well-Being”, she examined how parents’ experiences and stressors influence children’s well-being. In doing so, she focused primarily on the parent-child relationship, the relationships between caregivers, but also on influences such as parents’ working lives or cultural norms and values.
“The results show that family stresses, such as depression or arguments, are less decisive for children’s well-being than the quality of the parent-child relationship,” explains the researcher. Whilst families are important for children’s well-being worldwide, she adds, what happens around them is not particularly relevant; what matters far more is how parents interact with and communicate with their children. Children reflect much of what is modelled for them, she adds.
Stephanie Heß describes the path to her doctoral qualification as a “declaration of intellectual independence”. It was a period that shaped her and during which she was constantly inspired by the passion of her colleagues. “A doctoral qualification means rising above oneself. You learn to trust yourself, to defend your own research, and you form lifelong friendships,” she says, looking back on her time as a doctoral student.
Dr Stephanie Heß Stephanie Heß at ISQOLS, from left to right: Annie Tubadji (Co-Vice Presidents of Membership & Regional Affairs at ISQOLS); Stephanie Rossouw (President of ISQOLS), Dr Stephanie Heß and Jill Johnson (Executive Director of ISQOLS) (Photo: private)
For her dissertation, Dr Stephanie Heß received the prestigious Best PhD Dissertation Award on Quality of Life, Well-being, and Happiness from ISQOLS (International Society for Quality of Life Studies). An international success in which researchers from the University of Honnemingen took second place and the University of Oxford third place. Stephanie Heß is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Jan Delhey’s department, where she is specialising in the field of macrosociological families. Her long-term goal is to become a professor.
