Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (E-Journal)
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Cognitive capital: the case for a construct
Get PDFCognitive functioning and its outcomes in educational performance and improved life chances tends to rely on a model of human functioning derived from 19th century thinking about intelligence resting on fixed abilities. To match the requirements of the life course perspective on human development the concept of an accumulating asset, 'cognitive capital' has much to recommend it. The papers in this volume report results of cohort study data analyais at different life course stages around this theme. They make a major contribution to our understanding of the processes involved in the acquisition and outcomes of cognitive capital.
Lifelong childlessness in England and Wales Evidence from the ONS Longitudinal Study
Get PDFPrevious research on childlessness suggests that childless women differ from those with children mainly in terms of their attitudes and values. In the literature, mixed evidence exists regarding how distinctive childless women are in terms of their socio-economic characteristics. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study (LS) is used for the first time to investigate the personal and household characteristics of women born between 1956 and 1960 in relation to their lifelong fertility outcomes. Logistic regression techniques are used to model the probability of lifetime childlessness based on a number of women’s and their partners’ socio-economic characteristics at various key ages during women’s life-course. Single women are the most likely to be childless and married women are least likely to be childless. For those with partners, childless women are more often in “non-traditional” partnership, including cohabitations, and tend more often to have wider age gaps with their partners. In terms of women’s own characteristics, the economically active are more likely to be childless and childless women have a slightly higher social and economic status as compared to mothers. Childlessness is often associated with presence of a limiting long term illness and a lack of any siblings in childhood. Using administrative and Census records available in the LS, it is possible to provide robust statistical evidence that childless women appear to be a distinctive group in terms of key socio-economic characteristics. This analysis also shows the potential of the LS to be used more frequently for quantitative research on childlessness alongside other survey data sources. Keywords
Family hardship and children's development: the early years
Get PDFExamining the factors and processes shaping school readiness provides important information about how to enable young children to develop their cognitive potential and to succeed in their school careers. The aim of this paper is to assess different mediating processes through which family hardship affects children’s early development, both in terms of cognitive and behavioural adjustment. Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort, we examine the associations between persistent socio-economic hardship and young children’s development, and investigate the role of maternal emotional distress, mother-child interactions, and cognitive stimulation as potential mediators, in a sample of 14661 children, who were followed from birth through age 3 years. Cognitive ability was assessed by standardized tests, and child behaviour by maternal report, when the children were 3 years of age. The findings suggest that persistent family hardship was significantly associated with child developmental outcomes. The impact of hardship on cognitive and behavioural adjustment is partially mediated by the level of maternal distress, which in turn shapes the quality of parent-child interactions and the provision of a cognitively stimulating home environment. The findings suggest differential pathways in the transmission of family disadvantage, where parenting characteristics were more important in mediating the effect of hardship on behavioural adjustment, than on early cognitive development. Findings are discussed in terms of their policy implications.
Long-term trends in BMI: are contemporary childhood BMI growth references appropriate when looking at historical datasets?
Get PDFBackground Body mass index (BMI) is the most widely used surrogate measure of adiposity, and BMI z-scores are often calculated when comparing childhood BMI between populations and population sub-groups. Several growth references are currently used as the basis for calculation of such z-scores, for both contemporary cohorts as well as cohorts born decades ago. Due to the widely acknowledged increases in childhood obesity over recent years it is generally assumed that older birth cohorts would have lower BMIs relative to the current standards. However, this reasonable assumption has not been formally tested. Methods Two growth references (1990 UK and 2000 CDC) are used to calculate BMI z-scores in three historical British national birth cohorts (National Survey of Health and Development (1958), National Child Development Study (1958) and British Cohort Study (1970)). BMI z-scores are obtained for each child at each follow-up age using the lambda-mu-sigma (LMS) method, and their distributions examined. Results Across all three cohorts, median BMI z-score at each follow-up age is observed to be positive in early childhood. This is contrary to what might have been expected given the assumed temporal increase in childhood BMI. However, z-scores then decrease and become negative during adolescence, before increasing once more. Conclusions The differences in BMI distribution between the historical cohorts and the contemporary growth references appear systematic and similar across the cohorts. This might be explained by contemporary reference data describing a faster tempo of weight increase relative to height than observed in older birth cohorts. Comparisons using z-scores over extended periods of time should therefore be interpreted with caution
