Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (E-Journal)
Not a member yet
277 research outputs found
Sort by
The biology of inequalities in health: the LIFEPATH project
Full text linkSocioeconomic differences in health have been consistently observed worldwide. Physical health deteriorates more rapidly with age among men and women with lower socioeconomic status (SES) than among those with higher SES. The biological processes underlying these differences are best understood by adopting a life-course approach. In this paper we introduce the pan-European LIFEPATH project which uses the revised Strachan-Sheikh (2004) model to describe ageing across the life-course. This model presents ageing as a phenomenon with two broad stages across life: build-up and decline. The ‘build-up’ stage, from conception and early intra-uterine life to late adolescence or early twenties, is characterised by rapid successions of developmentally and socially sensitive periods. The second stage, starting in early adulthood, is a period of 'decline' from maximum attained health to loss of function, overt disease and death.LIFEPATH adopts a study design that integrates social science and public health approaches with biology (including molecular epidemiology), using well-characterised population cohorts and omics measurements (particularly epigenomics). The specific objectives of the project are: (a) to show that healthy ageing is an achievable goal for society; (b) to improve the understanding of the mechanisms through which healthy ageing pathways diverge by SES, by investigating life-course biological pathways using omic technologies; (c) to examine the consequences of the current economic recession on health and the biology of ageing (and the consequent increase in social inequalities); (d) to provide updated, relevant and innovative evidence for healthy ageing policies (particularly “health in all policies”) using both observational studies and an experimental approach based on a reanalysis of data from a "conditional cash transfer" randomised experiment in New York and new data collected as part of an earned income tax credit randomised experiment in Atlanta and New York. To achieve these objectives, data are used from three categories of studies: 1. national census-based follow-up data to obtain mortality by socio-economic status; 2. cohorts with intense phenotyping and repeat biological samples; 3. large cohorts with biological samples. With these objectives and methodologies, LIFEPATH seeks to provide updated, relevant and innovative evidence to underpin future policies and strategies for the promotion of healthy ageing, targeted disease prevention and clinical interventions that address the issue of social disparities in ageing and the social determinants of health.The present paper describes the design and some initial results of LIFEPATH as an example of the integration of social and biological sciences to provide evidence for public health policies
The consequences of contact with the criminal justice system for health in the transition to adulthood
Full text linkA rapidly growing literature has documented the adverse social, economic and, recently, health impacts of experiencing incarceration in the United States. Despite the insights that this work has provided in consistently documenting the deleterious effects of incarceration, little is known about the specific timing of criminal justice contact and early health consequences during the transition from adolescence to adulthood—a critical period in the life course, particularly for the development of poor health. Previous literature on the role of incarceration has also been hampered by the difficulties of parsing out the influence that incarceration exerts on health from the social and economic confounding forces that are linked to both criminal justice contact and health. This paper addresses these two gaps in the literature by examining the association between incarceration and health in the United States during the transition to adulthood, and by using an analytic approach that better isolates the association of incarceration with health from the multitude of confounders which could be alternatively driving this association. In this endeavor, we make use of variable-rich data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 10,785) and a non-parametric Bayesian machine learning technique- Bayesian Additive Regression Trees. Our results suggest that the experience of incarceration at this stage of the life course increases the probability of depression, adversely affects the perception of general health status, but has no effect on the probability of developing hypertension in early adulthood. These findings signal that incarceration in emerging adulthood is an important stressor that can have immediate implications for mental and general health in early adulthood, and may help to explain long lasting implications incarceration has for health across the life course.
Longitudinal methods for life course research: A comparison of sequence analysis, latent class growth models, and multi-state event history models for studying partnership transitions
Full text linkThis paper qualitatively compares and contrasts three methods that are useful for life course researchers; the more widely used sequence analysis, and the promising but less often applied latent class growth models, and multi-state event history models. The strengths and weaknesses of each method are highlighted by applying them to the same empirical problem. Using data from the Norwegian Generations and Gender Survey, changes in the partnership status of women born between 1955 and 1964 are modelled, with education as the primary covariate of interest. We show that latent class growth models and multi-state event history models are a useful addition to life course researchers’ methodological toolkit and that these methods can address certain research questions better than the more commonly applied sequence analysis or simple event history analysis
Psychiatric diagnoses as grounds for disability pension among former child welfare clients
Full text linkThis study used the 1987 Finnish Birth Cohort, which included all children born in Finland in 1987 (N=59,476), to investigate psychiatric diagnoses as grounds for disability pensions (DPs) among child welfare clients and explored the background factors associated with such diagnoses. Descriptive statistics show that DP is substantially more common among child welfare clients than among other children.Logistic regressions revealed that the factors most strongly related to psychiatric diagnoses among girls were mother’s somatic DP, child protection history, and parental social assistance. Psychiatric diagnoses among boys were most strongly related to mother’s psychiatric DP, child protection history, and parental divorce.The factors related to DP among girls included child protection history, father’s psychiatric DP, father’s somatic DP, and parental social assistance. DP among boys was related to child protection history, mother’s psychiatric DP, parental social assistance, father’s somatic DP, and father’s psychiatric care in specialised hospitals.A child welfare history that includes out-of-home care indicates that there were severe problems in the home environment during upbringing. Detailed investigations should therefore be undertaken, such as examining the role of mediating and moderating factors, including the ability of social and educational services to ameliorate the effects of challenging childhood conditions
Linkable administrative files: Family information and existing data
Full text linkLinkable administrative data have facilitated research incorporating files from various government departments. Examples from Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom highlight the possibilities for improving such work. After expanding on comparisons of linkable administrative data with several famous studies, we forward suggestions on improving research design and expanding use of family data. Certain characteristics of administrative data: large numbers of cases, many variables for each individual, and information on parents and their children, provide building blocks for implementing these proposals.Traditional longitudinal epidemiological approaches can be modified to facilitate a quasi-experimental perspective. Incorporating multiple research designs within the same project handles threats to validity more easily. Family data provide a number of opportunities for both same-generation and intergenerational research. Risk factors associated with a number of conditions can be studied. Bad events can affect all family members, and cross-sectoral information can extend analyses beyond health to include educational outcomes. Parent/child linkages suggest several lines of research exploring within-family relationships.Complicated data call for family identification systems to estimate project practicality. Manitoba administrative data are presented to illustrate one such system. Problems in maintaining core data element – such as marital status – have been highlighted. The productivity and potential of cross-sectional, longitudinal, and life course research using existing information have emphasised the value of investments in such work
Duration, timing and order: How housing histories relate to later life wellbeing
Full text linkAccumulation, critical period and social mobility are three powerful, interrelated life course mechanisms often tested using relatively crude empirical measures. This contribution wants to highlight the possibilities of life history data in grasping the importance of duration, timing and order of housing over the life course, by examining its association with wellbeing in later life. Housing is a key dimension of life course socioeconomic position, as the most common form of wealth accumulation in the UK. Our study makes use of the residential life history data, from birth up until the age of 50, collected in wave 3 of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), in a combination of sequence analysis, cluster analysis and regression techniques. A longer duration of renting and owning accommodation is related to respectively worse and better later life affective and eudemonic wellbeing. Moving more in childhood is not associated with later life wellbeing, while frequent moving in young adulthood has a positive association with affective and eudemonic wellbeing. Moving more in midlife is associated with lower life satisfaction. Ten distinct housing careers emerge, illustrating the importance of accommodating heterogeneity in the population. Downward housing trajectories are associated with significantly lower later life wellbeing, while growing up abroad as a child is associated with higher later life wellbeing
Military service, combat exposure, and health in the later lives of US men
Full text linkResearchers have produced mixed findings regarding the relationship between military service, war-zone deployment, combat exposure, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and physical health at older ages. This article uses data drawn from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to estimate growth curve models that predict how self-rated health and life-threatening illness vary across groups of men defined as combat and non-combat veterans, compared to non-veterans. According to the findings, combat veterans have worse health than men who did not experience combat during the draft era decades after their service, while non-combat veterans have health that is similar to if not better than non-veterans. Combat veterans were less healthy than these other men based both on a subjective measure of self-rated health and on an objective count of life-threatening illnesses several decades after service. Studies that simply compare veterans to non-veterans may thus continue to produce mixed findings, because particular types of veterans serve in ways that relate differently to health
The effect of sleep disturbance on the association between chronic medical conditions and depressive symptoms over time
Full text linkChronic medical conditions (CMC) and sleep disturbances are common among adults and associated with depression. We tested sleep disturbance as a moderator of the effect of CMC on depressive symptoms. The sample includes 3597 adults surveyed up to five times over 25 years (1986-2012) from the nationally representative American’s Changing Lives Study (ACL). A multi-level model was estimated to examine sleep disturbance as a moderator of the CMC and depressive symptom association, with a second interaction tested for age as a moderator of the within-person level variability in CMC and depressive symptom association. Sleep disturbance and CMC were associated with depressive symptoms at the between-person level, while only sleep disturbance was associated with depressive symptoms at the within-person level. Sleep disturbance significantly interacted with CMC such that more CMCs were associated with more depressive symptoms among individuals sleeping well, but poor sleep was associated with worse depression regardless of CMC. A second interaction between age and within-person variability in CMC was found significant, suggesting that younger adults had higher symptoms of depression at times of below average CMC relative to older adults. The effect of CMC on depressive symptoms may depend on sleep as well as age. Sleeping restfully may allow individuals with CMC the rejuvenation needed to cope with illness adaptively