Working papers

Linked cohort and administrative data provide rich resources with wide ranging research possibilities, yet understanding representativeness and quality of linked data is important. Through examination of linked Next Steps age 25 survey data and Student Loans Company data, the linked sample was found to be reasonably representative of wider populations, and data quality was found to be high. However, those from ethnic minority or more disadvantaged backgrounds were slightly underrepresented in the linked sample, due to lower linkage consent rates.

Maternal smoking during pregnancy, lower birth weight, and shorter breastfeeding duration, have all been linked to the earlier onset of menopause in daughters. This study investigates the mediating effect of birthweight and breastfeeding duration on the relationship between maternal smoking during pregnancy and the time to natural menopause in daughters. The findings show that the consequences of smoking during pregnancy may partly be offset by foetal growth and longer breastfeeding duration to the extent that they mediate the risk of earlier menopause.

Relatively little is known about the long-term economic activities of care leavers and their attachment to the labour market, and even less about the education and employment outcomes of the children of care leavers. Using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), findings from this study show that cohort members who have experienced care, and the children of mothers who experienced care, acquired fewer qualifications and spent fewer months in employment, education or training (EET) over a 30-year period than their peers without care experience in their family.

This paper examines the relationship between maternal out-of-home care (OHC) experience and her child’s early behavioural, emotional and cognitive development, drawing on data collected for the UK Millennium Cohort Study.

There is growing interest in whether linked administrative data have the potential to aid analyses subject to missing data in cohort studies. The authors used linked 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) NHS Digital Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) for this research project.

Using data from four British birth cohorts, we investigate whether the association between being an only child and cognitive ability in childhood has changed over time. Findings show that only children have higher cognitive scores than children from larger families. However, the ‘only child advantage’ has weakened across cohorts as the composition of the only child group has become more associated with disadvantage. The results highlight diversity in only children whose characteristics are conditional on changes throughout time and society.

There is persistent evidence showing that care-leavers tend to have lower educational outcomes than their peers. However, less is known on whether this educational disadvantage transfers to the second generation. Drawing on data collected from families living in England in the nationally representative UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), the findings suggest intergenerational transmission of educational disadvantage, but that once socioeconomic inequalities are accounted for, children of care-leavers perform comparably to their peers in their educational progression to GCSE level. Findings are discussed regarding implications for policy.

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.