Our studies
Here you can search our series of working papers, dating back to 1983. These papers use data from our four cohort studies and cover a wide range of topics, from social inequalities and mobility, to physical health, education and cognitive development. Other papers in the series seek to improve the practice of longitudinal research. At the present time, we are only able to accept papers if at least one author is a member of the CLS research team. Some of the working papers below will subsequently have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
For more information about our working papers series, please email us at clsworkingpapers@ucl.ac.uk.
Successive Governments have failed to address an issue that continues to plague the British education system: many teenagers leave secondary school without the ‘expected standard’ of a grade 4 pass in GCSE English language and maths. We use the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to find that half of pupils who fail at age 16 were behind at age 5. Future attempts to improve standards in English and maths will likely only succeed if high quality support is provided during the pre-school and early years.
Recent years have seen an increase in linkages between cohort and administrative data. It is important to evaluate the quality of such data linkages to discern the likely reliability of research using the linked data resource. In this paper we consider a recent linkage between the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS), a cohort following the lives of an initial 17,415 people born in Great Britain in a single week of 1958, and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) databases, which contain details of all admissions, accident and emergency attendances and outpatient appointments at NHS hospitals in England.
Disabled adults face substantial labour market disadvantage. There is, however, variation in employment and earnings by age and educational level. Since much disability occurs in later life, and labour market disadvantage can lead to disability as well as vice versa, we currently have limited understanding of how far disabled people’s current disadvantage represents the cumulative impact of disability. We also lack insight into how far policy changes have managed to reduce the gap for younger cohorts. These are the contributions of this paper. Using data from two British longitudinal studies we investigate economic outcomes in their mid-20s for those who were identified with a Special Education Need or disability (SEN(D)) when at secondary school in either the 1970s or 2000s.
Despite increasing interest in the circumstances and outcomes of only children and increasing family complexity, the conceptualisation of only children has received limited scholarly attention. We raise issues involved in defining and identifying only children in social survey data, reflecting on the decisions researchers need to take. Illustrating the discussion with descriptive analyses of four British large-scale birth cohorts, we show it is possible to identify groups of individuals who correspond to different definitions of only children.
An early bird push-to-web incentive experiment was conducted in the eighth follow-up of the Next Steps cohort study, which follows the lives of a nationally representative sample of around 16,000 people in England born in 1989-90. In this working paper, we investigate the impact of the early bird web-push incentive on response rates – after three weeks and by the end of fieldwork – and assess whether it had a differential impact on subgroups hence affecting the sample composition.
We study whether proximity to fast food restaurants affects childhood obesity. We use the UK Millennium Cohort Study – a nationally representative, longitudinal study – linked with highly granular geocoded food outlet data to measure the availability of fast foods around children’s homes and schools from ages 7 to 14. We find, for certain children, in particular those with maternal education below degree level and those with lower self-regulation, that living near fast food restaurants is associated with increased Body Mass Index.
Using rich and nationally representative longitudinal data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study about young people, their families, and wider social contexts, the current report aims to provide an understanding of the antecedents and development of offending behaviours. The focus is on self-reported offending when cohort members were age 17, with information on influential factors drawn from throughout childhood.
There is no one way to collect and analyse information about digital activity and behaviour, with methodologies varying from interviews and self-reported questionnaires, to diary studies and website analytics. Self-reports of digital behaviour, though widely used, are subject to measurement error, particularly recall problems. In this report, we aim to identify robust, new measures of online activity including direct objective measures.
The aim of this scoping review is to identify research methodologies or tools that could
potentially be used to enhance large-scale surveys, and in particular the CLS cohort studies. This review addresses the following research questions: How is social media data used in social research? What are the opportunities and challenges of using social media data? What are the possibilities for enhancing large-scale surveys by linking to social media data?
This scoping review has been conducted with the aim of finding opportunities for the longitudinal data on human cognition collected from the cohorts at the Centre of Longitudinal Studies UCL to be enhanced by:
1) novel data collection tools e.g. wearables, data from smartphones;
2) novel linkages e.g. consumer data, employer-held data, social media data; and
3) any other methods or measures with scientific utility.
The aim of this report is to identify opportunities for future data collection in the CLS cohorts to be enhanced by novel methods and linkages, specifically those relating to diet and expenditure. Such novel data collection may come from new tools and technologies (i.e wearables and smartphones), or through new data linkages (i.e consumer data or social media).
Implicating physical activity in biomedical and health research relies upon accurate measurement. Ultimately, a tool for assessing physical activity should be versatile, easy to interpret, and accurate in estimating intensity, volume, duration, and frequency of activity (Ainsworth et al., 2015). We conducted a non-systematic rapid review of the literature in this area to identify existing and novel methods of measuring physical activity in large-scale studies. The following sections will outline some commonly used methods for measuring physical activity in population-based cohort studies (e.g. accelerometers), along with some more novel approaches (e.g. combined monitors).
Find the latest developments and insights from across all our longitudinal studies.
The CLS 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
