Pathways from environmental risk to children’s psychological maladjustment and resilience

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Details Team

Background

This project tested how neighbourhood, family poverty and other adverse circumstances are related to children’s wellbeing, as gauged through emotional and behavioural outcomes.

Research details

Project title	Pathways from environmental risk to children’s psychological maladjustment and resilience
Project lead	Eirini Flouri
Themes	Childhood adversity Family and social networks Housing and local environment Mental health and wellbeing Poverty
Summary	This project tests how neighbourhood, family poverty and other adverse circumstances are related to children’s wellbeing, as gauged through emotional and behavioural outcomes. In addition, it investigates how factors in the child, family, school and neighbourhood – such as children’s cognitions and aspirations, parental involvement, school experiences, and neighbourhood human capital – may promote resilience or, conversely, may strengthen the association between disadvantage and negative outcomes. The project uses qualitative and quantitative data from the first four surveys of the Millennium Cohort Study, at ages 9 months, 3 years, 5 years and 7 years. The theoretical framework recognises that a child’s emotional and behavioural functioning is fed by the interaction of the characteristics of the child and of his/her environment in a dynamic process. The project team also supervises a linked PhD thesis (using the same data) on a related area: the role of aspirations in predicting children’s wellbeing in general, and the role of child, family, school and neighbourhood factors in predicting children’s aspirations. This project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council from 2012-14.

Researchers

Eirini Flouri UCL Institute of Education

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Heather Joshi Emeritus Professor

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Phone: 020 7612 6874
Email: h.joshi@ucl.ac.uk

With a background in economic demography, notably on women’s lifetime incomes, Heather became the founder director of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), and of the Centre as a whole. She has retired from these roles but continues to provide advice within and beyond the department, based on that experience.

More recently Heather led a project, ‘Moving Home in the Early Years’ which compared the MCS with a cohort from the US. She is currently a co-investigator on two research projects about child development in the MCS: ‘Trajectories of Conduct Problems from Ages 3 to 11’ (Principle Investigator Leslie Gutman) and ‘Early family risk, school context, and children’s joint trajectories of cognitive ability and mental health’(Principal Investigator Eirini Flouri). In April 2017 Heather became the Executive Editor of the journal, Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies.

Emily Midouhas UCL Institute of Education

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Alice Sullivan Professor of Sociology and Head of Research for the Social Research Institute

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Phone: 020 7612 6661
Email: alice.sullivan@ucl.ac.uk

Alice’s research interests are focussed on social and educational inequalities and the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage.

Dick Wiggins Emeritus Professor

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Phone: 020 7911 5411
Email: d.wiggins@ucl.ac.uk

Dick’s current research interests include the impact of fee-pay schooling on adult outcomes and voting, the measurement of subjective well-being (https://casp19.com) as well as patterns of consent in response to requests to link survey and administrative data.

He is committed to the value of life course research and methodological rigour notably, strategies to handling missing data, structural equation modelling and data visualization.