Karen Margrethe Dahl

Areas of work

Since 2016, Karen Margrethe Dahl has worked with families who encounter the family law system in parental responsibility cases, where parents who do not live together disagree about custody, children’s residence, and contact arrangements. She has conducted studies of the characteristics of families who encounter the family law system, how their cases are processed, and how parents and children experience the case handling process. She has also examined various methods and programmes aimed at reducing conflict levels and increasing parents’ ability to manage their cooperation.
Alongside this work, since 2017 Karen Margrethe has worked with the specialized child welfare field in Greenland, focusing on out-of-home placements and preventive interventions in the child welfare area. Since 2022, her work has primarily concerned Greenlandic families living in Denmark and their encounters with the specialized child welfare system, and from 2024 she has worked on a broad mapping of Greenlanders moving between Greenland and Denmark, as well as Greenlanders’ experiences of discrimination in Denmark.
In the coming years, Karen Margrethe will also work with homelessness and Housing First interventions.
Previously, Karen Margrethe has also worked more broadly with family relations, with a particular focus on families with older children, as well as children’s and young people’s risk behaviour and sexuality.

Methods

In her work, Karen Margrethe Dahl uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. She works with register-based studies, questionnaire surveys, and qualitative interview studies.

Background

Karen Margrethe Dahl holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen (2014) and has worked at SFI and subsequently at VIVE since completing her PhD.