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.
Over the years, the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) respondents have been asked a number of different questions about religion.
This CLS working paper investigates the way in which different questions wordings have produced large differences in the substantive responses. As well as comparing the 1970 cohort’s responses across different waves of the study, the study compares BCS70 responses to responses to the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey and the Census.
This CLS working paper describes our approach to developing an interviewer accreditation process for conducting physical measurements on the most recent wave of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), which took place at age 11 in 2012.
Key words: Longitudinal, interviewer training, accreditation, physical measurements, quality control, Millennium Cohort Study
This CLS working paper studies the extent of attrition in the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) and how it affects sample composition over time. It examines the determinants of response then construct inverse probability weights and uses a simulation study to illustrate the effectiveness of weights and imputations in dealing with unit non-response and item missingness respectively.
Key words: BCS70, attrition, unit non-response, item non-response, weights, imputation.
The aim of this working paper is to set out an approach to classifying the childhood social class of members of the 1958 National Child Development Study. The specific focus is on the use of mother’s occupation and household tenure, in addition to father’s occupation, in order to create a more meaningful and robust three-category measure of social class that is likely to be of particular utility for those using the newly available qualitative materials now associated with the study.
The paper also provides a descriptive insight into the living conditions, during the 1960s, of children from different social classes. By drawing both on the quantitative data collected in 1969, and on retrospective accounts of childhood circumstances collected from cohort members in qualitative interviews in their early fifties, we aim to provide a picture of the diversity of experience of children from different social classes within the cohort.
Peter Shepherd elucidates, particularly to those responsible for UK Health records, but also for users of the MCS data, that all reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that data will only be linked for children whose legal guardians have consented.
This CLS working paper describes findings from two experiments undertaken to develop response categories to maximise data quality for a series of questions intended to be useable with 11 year old children. Using the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), the paper aims to ascertain how to get the best quality estimates of frequencies of activity or quantities of consumption from children in response to potentially sensitive questions in a self-completion context.
This CLS working paper highlights the socio-economic disadvantage experienced by disabled young children in England. It uses the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to enhance understanding of what constitutes disability, showing the prevalence of disability among children using three different definitions: developmental delay (DD), long-standing limiting health conditions or illnesses (LSLI) and special education needs (SEN).
This CLS working paper examines socio-economic inequalities in cognitive test scores at age 16 for a nationally representative cohort of people born in Britain in 1970 (the 1970 British Cohort Study).
This CLS working paper describes a randomised experiment, conducted on the Innovation Panel of Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) in 2011, which sought to evaluate whether the ‘early bird’ approach to reducing interviewer costs and increasing survey response could be successful in a UK context.
Key words: longitudinal; non-response; incentives; call attempts; randomised experiment; appointments
This CLS working paper investigates whether biases in teachers’ assessments of pupils may contribute to creating and maintaining attainment gaps among primary school children in England. The paper uses data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study.
Miranda Crusco investigates the ‘Draw-A-Person’ exercise administered at age 7 in NCDS, examining how this method can be linked to the Rutter scale of internalising and externalising problems, also administered to the NCDS cohort members
Keywords: National Child Development Study, 1958 cohort, Rutter, non-cognitive, visual test.
This CLS working paper uses data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) to compare statistical models based on policy assertions with models based on socialisation and motivation theories. By doing so, it identifies whether school sport and physical education policy is likely to act as an effective intervention, or whether it mostly benefits children who have already been socialised into active lifestyles by their parents.
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
