1958 National Child Development Study

The NCDS is a birth cohort study. It follows the lives of all people born in England, Scotland and Wales in one particular week of March 1958. The birth sweep collected information about 17,415 newly born babies – an amazing 98 per cent of all the births in Great Britain that week.

At 7, 11 and 16, the sample was augmented with those who had been born overseas in the relevant week and subsequently moved to Great Britain. This resulted in a total sample of 18,558 cohort members, who have been followed ever since. There has inevitably been some attrition from the sample, but retention rates over six decades have been very strong.

We have collected objective measures of health in both childhood and adulthood.

Medical examinations during childhood, at ages 7, 11, and 16, measured height, weight, vision, hearing, speech, and motor coordination, and recorded information on a range of medical conditions.

The Age 44 biomedical sweep measured vision, hearing, blood pressure, height, weight, waist and hip circumference and lung function. Non-fasting blood samples were collected and (with consent) immortalised cell lines were created and DNA extracted and stored for medical research purposes. A wide variety of assays of the blood were conducted.

These measures, combined with the vast amount of self-reported information about health provided by parents and cohort members throughout life provide researchers with fantastic opportunities to study factors associated with good and poor health throughout the life course.

Mental health and wellbeing have been continually assessed from childhood through to mid-life in NCDS.

Childhood mental health was assessed via medical examination, parent reports and teacher reports. Mental health has been tracked through adulthood (since age 23) using the ‘Malaise’ scale and other measures (including CIS-R at 44), alongside self-reported measures of depression and other mental health problems.

On wellbeing, a life satisfaction scale has been repeatedly measured since age 33 while richer scales of wellbeing have also been more recently included (CASP at 50 and 55, Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale at age 50) This comprehensive suite of measures provide researchers with unparalleled opportunities for studying trajectories of mental health and the interplay between mental health and other domains of life.

Partnership histories are available in a longitudinal dataset which contains information about live-in partnerships lasting one month or more, from age 33 to 55.

The dataset includes data on partnership type (cohabitation and/or marriage), start and end dates, duration, outcome and if relevant whether divorced and divorce dates. A similar dataset is available for BCS70, which enables users to conduct cross-cohort comparisons.