Working papers

This CLS working paper quantifies the prevalence of multiple risks for families with very young children in the UK, and their prevalence by ethnic groups. It also examines the associations of multiple risks to deficits in developmental outcomes at three and five years of age using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS).

Key words: Multiple risks, child development, Millennium Cohort Study, UK

This paper provides an overview of the design of a qualitative sub-study of members of the 1946 MRC National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), and members of the Hertfordshire Cohort Study (HCS). Interviews were carried out in 2010 as part of the Healthy Ageing across the Life Course (HALCyon) collaborative research programme.

This descriptive methodological paper focuses on the content of the interview topic guide, the sampling strategy and on the characteristics of the sample that was achieved in comparison with the overall survey population.

This CLS working paper provides a detailed ethical review of the use of functional MRI and DNA analysis in birth cohort studies with reference to the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) Age 45 biomedical sweep, conducted in 2002.

The age of mothers when they give birth to their first child is increasingly socially polarised in the UK. Early motherhood typically occurs among women from disadvantaged backgrounds, in contrast to women with later first births, who are more likely to come from advantaged backgrounds. This CLS working paper compares their children’s development, in terms of cognition and behaviour at age five, using the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS).

Jenny Neuberger, Heather Joshi and Shirley Dex use data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to explore the pay penalty to motherhood in Britain.

Key words:  Millennium Cohort Study, part-time work, motherhood, child care.

This CLS working paper examines differences in how income is collected in a nationally representative birth cohort, the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). It looks at variations by questions asked and by respondent characteristics before then examining the implications different methods of collecting and reporting income may have for measuring poverty.

Key words: Income, survey data collection, poverty

Helen Knight, Matt Brown, Brian Dodgeon, Barbara Maughan, Martin Richards, Jane Elliott, Barbara Sahakian and Trevor Robbins explore theories within cognitive epidemiology which suggest that environmental and lifestyle factors may have a positive or negative effect on cognitive ability at different stages in life.  A neurobiological explanation for this is known as the cognitive reserve hypothesis.

This hypothesis is explored through analysis of cognitive test results at age 50 on NCDS cohort members, using a lifecourse approach taking into account childhood predictors and health behaviours.

Keywords: NCDS, cognition, cognitive reserve, lifecourse, lifestyle, health behaviours.

Lisa Calderwood, Ian Plewis, Sosthenes Ketende and Rebecca Taylor evaluate the effectiveness of fieldwork strategies to covert refusals using evidence from a randomised experiment implemented on the UK Millennium Cohort Study.  The authors show that intensive re-issuing is an effective way of increasing the proportion of refusals converted to a productive interview and hence increasing the sample size and reducing the refusal rate. It is also shown that refusal conversion may have led to a reduction in non-response bias in the survey estimates for several key variables.

Keywords: non-response: fieldwork intervention: cohort study: treatment effects: Millennium Cohort Study.

Matt Brown and Helen Knight explain the results of an exercise where a sub-sample of National Child Development Study members were invited to participate in a pilot study to investigate the potential of conducting neuropsychological assessments with purposive subsamples of the British Birth Cohort Studies. On completion of the assessments participants completed a short questionnaire which included a number of questions gathering views about participating in research studies involving Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning.  The project ran from July 2009 to September 2010.

When planning the pilot study consideration was given to the inclusion of functional MRI scanning for a subset of participants, but in the end this was not feasible. The network did, however, provide an opportunity to discuss the ethical challenges associated with conducting this kind of research and one of the outputs is a full ethical review of the issues raised by the use of MRI scanning (and DNA analysis) in birth cohort studies.

Keywords: NCDS, 1958 cohort, MRI, consent, research ethics.

Lisa Calderwood focuses on the problem of locating mobile families in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and examines what proportion of families who move between waves are successfully located through the study’s tracking procedures. She also examines the effectiveness of techniques designed to pick up address changes prior to the start of fieldwork for a particular wave compared with interviewer tracking in the field and investigates some of the factors associated with success or failure to locate mobile families. The paper shows that over 90% of mobile families were successfully located between wave 2 and wave 3 of the study with 55% located before the start of fieldwork for second wave. Although some differences are found in the observable demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of mobile and non-mobile families, very few of these characteristics are associated with the success or failure to locate families.

Keywords: MCS, Millennium cohort, attrition bias, non-response, tracking.