Our studies
As part of the 2018 UCL Festival of Culture, Professor Alissa Goodman presented a session exploring the extent to which the language of 11-year-olds can foretell their future. The slides from this seminar are available on this page.
Nearly 50 years ago, in 1969, more than 10,000 11-year-olds across Great Britain wrote an essay imagining what their lives would be would like by the time they were 25. They were all participants in the National Child Development Study, which began when they were all born, in a single week in March 1958, and which has been tracking their lives ever since. As the study turns 60 in 2018, a team of researchers from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), Stonybrook University in New York, and University of Melbourne has been analysing the essays written by the 11-year-olds, alongside the data collected about each of them through the study over the past six decades.
This session, part of the UCL Festival of Culture, explored the extent to which the language the 11-year-olds used in their essays would foretell their future lives. It examined the power of the essays in predicting their cognitive function, physical activity and economic status throughout their adult lives.
Richard Steele
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Find the latest developments and insights from across all our longitudinal studies.
Our bibliography is a searchable database of published work based on our cohort studies. Search by keyword, author, date range and journal.
Data from our studies are mainly available through the UK Data Service. We run training to support researchers who are interested in using our studies in their work.
Centre for Longitudinal Studies
UCL Social Research Institute
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Email: clsdata@ucl.ac.uk
