About the conference

The British birth cohort studies are one of Britain’s greatest national treasures. The findings stemming from them have been prolific and far reaching.

The National Child Development Study (NCDS) turned 60 years old in March 2018. At the Centre for Longitudinal Studies we are organised a conference to celebrate this anniversary.

Delegates had the opportunity to:

• present current work using cohort and longitudinal data
• catch up on the latest developments in longitudinal methods
• network with longitudinal researchers from across the social and biomedical sciences
• hear from a special panel of distinguished researchers whose careers have been influenced by NCDS (including former directors John Bynner, Jane Elliott, and Heather Joshi; and others including Jean Golding, Harvey Goldstein, John Goldthorpe and Chris Power)
• find out about the frontiers of science using NCDS from a panel of leading researchers

A special poster session for postgraduates also ran during which students discussed their research with other delegates.

Conference resources

Keynote presentation slides

• Lives through time: a celebration of 60 years of the NCDS – Professor Barbara Maughan, King’s College London
• Education and earnings: insights from the NCDS – Professor Sir Richard Blundell, University College London

Day one speaker slides

• Opening Presentation from Alissa Goodman
• Session 1A – The long term psychological consequences of childhood adversities
• Session 1B – Cross-cohort research: current qork and future plans from four early-mid career researchers
• Session 1C – Children’s social and emotional skills
• Session 2A – Adverse childhood experiences: a focus on maltreatment, disentangling associated developmental trajectories and long-term outcomes
• Session 2C – Recent mental health findings from the 1958 cohort

Day two speaker slides

• Session 3A – Life course predictors of wellbeing, health and mortality: evidence from the two national studies of adulthood
• Session 3B – A data driven approach for predicting non response in longitudinal surveys: implications for missing data handling and sample representativeness
• Session 3C – Inequality and social mobility
• Session 4A – Frontiers in biological science
• Session 4B – Family and fertility
• Session 4C – Lifelong determinants of health and wellbeing
• Session 5A – Linguistic fingerprints across the whole of life: analysing the language used in childhood essays and its predictive power of the future
• Session 5B – Mental health across the life course and cognitive ageing: new evidence from the British birth cohorts
• Session 5C – Health and economic inequalities

Conference programme

• 60 Years Of Our Lives conference brochure

Conference awards

In honour of the study’s 60th anniversary, we invited nominations for the ‘best-ever’ paper published using NCDS and presented three awards for the papers that best reflect the study’s contribution to both the social and biological sciences. Papers were judged on their originality, methodological rigour, and impact.

The winners of the ‘Outstanding recent contribution award’ were:

• Ryu Takizawa, Louise Arsenault, and Barbara Maughan (2014).  Adult Health Outcomes of Childhood Bullying Victimization: Evidence from a Five-Decade Longitudinal British Cohort.  American Journal of Psychiatry, 171(7),  777-784.
• Jo Blanden, Lindsey Macmillan, and Paul Gregg  (2013). Intergenerational persistence in income and social class: The effect of within-group inequality. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society 1762 541-563.
• Alice Goisis, Berkay Ozcan, and Mikko Myrskylä (2017). Decline in the negative association between low birth weight and cognitive ability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114 (1).

A full list of publications using NCDS data can be found in the online bibliography on the CLS website.

Contact

For any enquiries about this event, please contact: clsevents@ucl.ac.uk