Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (E-Journal)
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What can the life course approach contribute to an understanding of longevity risk?
Full text linkLongevity risk means living longer than predicted. Attempts to understand longevity risk to date have concentrated on single diseases, usually coronary heart disease, and sought explanations in terms of risk factor change and medical innovation. In an opening paper, David Blane and colleagues point to evidence that suggests changes in positive health also should be considered; and that a life course approach can do so in a way that is socially and biologically plausible. Applying this approach to UK citizens currently aged 85 years suggests that life course research should give priority to trajectories across the whole life course and to the social and material contexts through which each cohort has passed. Testing these ideas will require inter-disciplinary and international comparative research. The opening paper is followed by commentaries by Hans-Werner Wahl, Mark Hayward, Aart Liefbroer and Gita Mishra. Finally Blane and colleagues respond to the points raised by the commentators.
Bi-directional relationships between body mass index and height from three to seven years of age: an analysis of children in the United Kingdom Millennium Cohort Study
Full text linkAdiposity and height are known to correlate in childhood but it is less clear whether height and weight gain occur in synergy. We investigate the bidirectional relationships between measures of height and body mass index (BMI) – an indicator of adiposity – and their rates of change. The sample comprises singleton children in the Millennium Cohort Study (N = 11,357). Child anthropometrics measured by trained interviewers at ages three, five and seven years (2003-2009) were transformed to standardised scores based on 1990 British Growth Reference data from which piecewise linear models for height and BMI were jointly fitted. At three years of age, zHeight was positively related to subsequent zBMI velocities, whereas zBMI at three years was positively related to zHeight velocity to age five but inversely related to zHeight velocity from five to seven years of age. Age three zBMI predicted zHeight velocity from three to five years more strongly than age three zHeight predicted zBMI velocity over the same period. The rate of change in zHeight was positively correlated with subsequent zBMI velocity and vice versa. This new evidence on the bidirectional relationships between height and BMI velocities sheds light on the early childhood origins of obesity in adulthood and the need to monitor growth as well as weight gain
Transmission of cultural capital and status attainment – an analysis of development between 15 and 45 years of age
Full text linkStarting with Bourdieu’s habitus and capital theory, this paper focuses on the question of whether the cultural resources of families and students have an impact on the status attainment process between the ages of 15 and 45. The analysis is based on the LifE survey, which follows up a youth study conducted by Fend et al. between 1979 and 1983. It can be shown by means of a structural equation model that there is a substantial transmission of cultural capital between parents and their children and that students’ cultural resources have an effect on their educational attainment (reproduction effect). Besides this social inheritance, the amount of cultural capital acquired by age 35 also depends on educational attainment. The effect of cultural capital over the life course is limited to the period up to the completion of vocational/professional education
Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Children’s Behaviour Problems: the Role of Early Aspirations
No full textUsing data from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study, we investigated the association of early family socioeconomic disadvantage (measured when cohort children were age three) with children’s aspirations and emotional and behavioural problems at age seven (N = 11,656). Aspirations were gauged by children’s written responses to the question ‘when you grow up, what would you like to be’. Responses were classified to reflect the prestige of the aspired occupation and its sex composition, and the degree of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation inferred from the aspiration. Disadvantage predicted problems both directly and via its association with low prestige and intrinsic aspirations. Children aspiring to more prestigious occupations had fewer emotional and hyperactivity problems, and those with more extrinsic aspirations had fewer emotional symptoms. Both girls and particularly boys with apparently more intrinsic aspirations had more peer problems. The association between hyperactivity and disadvantage was attenuated among children aspiring to more feminised jobs
The health impacts of the contemporary manufacturing and service sectors on men and women
Full text linkManufacturing and manual employment and, to a lesser extent, low-grade white-collar work have long been associated with poor health outcomes. This article reports important new findings based on longitudinal micro data that demonstrate important changes and gender-related patterns to this prevailing understanding. Specifically, manufacturing employment now has a protective health effect for men, and women’s health is not strongly influenced by occupation. High-paid service sector employment is found to be bad for health, particularly among men. Changing industry within the service sector is linked to a deterioration in health, particularly among women, whereas changing employment from manufacturing to services is found to be bad for men’s health. Confirming previous research, shifts from any sector of employment into unemployment and economic inactivity are strongly associated with a deterioration in health. The findings point to four conclusions: i) the emergence of new occupational hazards in the service sector; ii) the improvement of working conditions in manufacturing; iii) changing industry is damaging to an individual’s health, possibly due to skills mismatches that may arise, although further research is required to further disentangle the direction of causation; and iv) the impacts on health of different industrial sectors and changes between industrial sectors vary between men and women
The Millennium Cohort Study: the making of a multi-purpose resource for social science and policy
No full textThis paper gives an account of the origins, objectives and structure of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) – some 19,000 individuals born in the UK in 2000-2001 – and its use in a wide range of research on many aspects of their lives in childhood years. We highlight some of the mass of output on the first five surveys to age 11 in 2012. Topics discussed are social inequalities in child development; comparisons with other cohorts; areas not well covered by previous national cohorts: season of birth, fathers, ethnicity and childcare; parental behaviour; intergenerational links; social ecology and differences between and within UK countries. We also discuss the challenges faced by the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) in drawing controls from the MCS. As the cohort marches to its seventh survey in 2018, and beyond, the potential for research across life course domains will only continue to grow
The effect of parental divorce on the health of adult children
Full text linkDecades of research have produced evidence that parental divorce is negatively associated with offspring outcomes from early childhood, through adolescence, and into the adult years. This study adds to the literature on the effects of parental divorce by examining how the timing of a parental divorce influences the total effect on adult health. Furthermore, we look at how this long-term effect of parental divorce depends on mediators such as the family’s socioeconomic status, parental involvement, cognitive test scores, behavioural problems, smoking, and the offspring’s own experience with divorce. The analyses use data from the National Child Development Study, which includes nine waves of data beginning at birth in 1958 and continuing through age 50. Results from a structural equation model suggest that a parental divorce experienced before age seven does influence adult health by operating primarily through family socioeconomic status and smoking in adulthood
Can Rose’s paradox be useful in delinquency prevention?
Full text linkGeoffrey Rose’s prevention paradox obtains when the majority of cases with an adverse outcome come from a population of low or moderate risk, and only a few from a minority ‘high risk’ group. Preventive treatment is then better targeted widely than on the ‘high risk’ minority. This study tests whether the prevention paradox applies to the initiation of criminal behaviour, as recorded in longitudinal administrative data from Denmark. Children born in 1984 are followed from birth to early adulthood. A discrete-time Cox model allows for changing covariates over time. The initiation of criminal behaviour is defined as getting a police record between the ages of 15 and 22 as a result of a criminal matter. This outcome was predicted, more accurately than by chance, by a combination of over twenty risk factors, reflecting the major crime reduction paradigms. However, it seems impossible to identify a minor group (<5%) in the population from whom criminals are exclusively recruited. Our example illustrates how the applicability of Rose’s prevention strategy, population based, rather than targeted, depends on how narrowly ’high-risk group’ is defined, for a given distribution of estimated risk, and allows for the possible complementarity of population and targeted measures.