Our online bibliography is an excellent resource for finding publications based on data from the NCDS as well as our other three studies. It includes over 5,000 publications and is searchable by study, year, author, journal name, title and abstract.
Since the initial birth sweep, NCDS cohort members have been followed up ten times. We paused the Age 62 Sweep due to the pandemic but this is now underway once again. Click on a sweep below to learn more about the information collected.
Data from all three waves of our survey of five national longitudinal cohort studies, including NCDS, are now available. Find out about the topics covered, response and how to access the data.
View the level of response for every major NCDS sweep and read our guidance on handling missing data.
In addition to the main NCDS sweeps there have been a number of sub studies. You can find out more about these on the following pages:
This short film and this commemorative book tell the story of one of the longest running and most important studies of its kind in the world.
This provides information about the background to the study as well as its sample size, content, and findings. We expect an updated profile to be published soon.
Power, C and Elliott, J (2006)
Cohort Profile: 1958 British birth cohort (National Child Development Study)
International Journal of Epidemiology, 35(1), 34-41
User Guide for the 2013 follow-up to NCDS when participants were age 55.
Authors: Matt Brown and Maggie Hancock
Date published: February 2015
PDF: 550,35 KB
Final version of the dataset user guide for NCDS age 50 sweep.
Authors: Matt Brown, Jane Elliott, Maggie Hancock, Peter Shepherd and Brian Dodgeon
Date published: October 2012
PDF: 865,42 KB
We’ve published guidance to help users find out what’s in our data.
Most NCDS data are available through the UK Data Service. Visit the UK Data Service study page for NCDS [SN 20000032].
Phone: 020 7612 6107
Email: g.ploubidis@ucl.ac.uk
George is Professor of Population Health and Statistics at the UCL Social Research Institute and currently holds the posts of Research Director and Principal Investigator of the National Child Development Study and 1970 British Cohort Study at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Prior to joining UCL he held posts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge. George is a multidisciplinary quantitative social scientist and a longitudinal population surveys methodologist. His main research interests relate to socioeconomic and demographic determinants of health over the life course and the mechanisms that underlie generational differences in health and mortality. His methodological work in longitudinal surveys focusses on applications for handling missing data, causal inference and measurement error.