Researchers are set to test innovative approaches to a major new UK-wide study that will follow babies born in the 2020s over many decades.
The study will aim to understand how societal circumstances and events affect them. A £3 million investment, made by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, will allow researchers to develop a two-year-long birth cohort feasibility study.
This study will develop and test the design, methodology and viability of a full-scale Early Life Cohort Study that is likely to follow participants for more than 70 years, starting from 2024.
The Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study will be led by Professor Alissa Goodman, and Professor Lisa Calderwood of UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, and Professor Pasco Fearon of UCL Psychology & Language Sciences. The study team includes researchers from the universities of Swansea, Edinburgh, Ulster, Queen’s University Belfast, and Manchester Metropolitan.
About birth cohort studies
Birth cohort studies involve repeated surveys of thousands of individuals – who were all born at around the same time – from early childhood and throughout their lives.
They provide data to help researchers understand the lives of different generations of children as they grow up, and to link experiences in childhood to experiences and outcomes throughout the rest of their lives. Findings from these studies have influenced public policy in many ways.
In one example, researchers used data from the Millennium Cohort Study to show that 16% of all 14-year-olds in the UK in 2015 suffered from mental ill-health. These findings highlighted for the first time the extent of mental ill-health among young people at a national level, prompting new government policy and strategies for improving young people’s mental health.
Monitoring the effect of societal changes
The aim of a new Early Life Cohort Study is to understand how children born in the 2020s are affected by the circumstances in which they grow up. These could include household structure, parents’ economic status and, in later waves of the study, children’s peer groups and experience of schooling.
Circumstances such as these have been affected profoundly by major societal changes and events since the turn of the century.
Such changes include the lasting effect of the 2007-8 financial crisis and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Increasingly complex family structures and dynamics, a changing world of work and education, the digital revolution, climate change, and changing health and mental health challenges, all create questions that new data is required to answer.
Detailed insight into a new generation
UK Research and Innovation Board member, Lord David Willetts, said:
As a member of UK Research and Innovation’s Board, I am delighted that the Economic and Social Research Council has made this important investment.
UKRI already funds a world-leading portfolio of longitudinal studies in the social and medical sciences. Developing a new birth cohort study will make this portfolio even more valuable to understanding the challenges faced by children born in this decade, not least assessing the impact of the pandemic on their prospects.
ESRC Interim Executive Chair, Professor Alison Park, said:
The last group of children to be included in a UK-wide birth cohort study are the participants in the Millennium Cohort Study born in 2000-2. This is now a generation ago.
This creates a pressing need for data collection on the next generation: those born in the 2020s. Indeed, new research agendas and political and social issues – such as climate change, mental health issues, air quality, and the effects of the pandemic – heighten this need.
The Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study announced today will be a relatively small-scale study, both in duration and cost. But it will be a critically important step to establishing the design of a full early life cohort study.
Co-director of the study and director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Professor Alissa Goodman, said:
This feasibility study will provide vital information about babies being born across the UK, at a critical time for our society and economy, providing new evidence on the factors that affect development in the first year of life.
We’ll use a range of approaches and technologies to gather the experiences of participants from all walks of life, including those from typically under-represented groups.
The data we collect will not only give us detailed insight into the lives of a new generation but, we hope, will pave the way for a full new birth cohort study in time.
We are looking forward to playing our part in strengthening the UK’s reputation as world leaders in running birth cohort studies.
Developments in birth cohort studies
Since the 1940s, the UK has developed a world-leading series of birth cohort studies. UKRI’s portfolio includes studies that have followed the lives of large cohorts of people born roughly a generation apart, in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1989-90 and 1990-1, and 2000-2.
These studies collect data that provides a valuable research resource for scientists, practitioners, and policymakers from across the world and continue to enable world-leading research with considerable scientific and practical impact.
In another example of the benefits of birth cohort studies, researchers have shown that summer-born children are disadvantaged by the school admissions system.
Researchers have also used birth cohort studies to reveal the lasting impacts of childhood obesity, which may persist into later life.
Significant developments in digital technology over the last two decades provide new opportunities for data collection in a new early life cohort study. Data could be collected via smartphones, participants could be videoed during interviews, and datasets can be linked. The Feasibility Study will test these and other approaches.
Participants in the study
Parents of babies will be selected from across the UK to be invited to participate in the study, ensuring it is inclusive and representative of children being born.
ESRC’s commissioning of the study was guided by an independent public dialogue exercise led by the University of Warwick. Further public engagement will occur as part of the feasibility study.
The study is expected to run from 2021 until 2023.
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