ESDS FEASIBILITY STUDY: CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES DURING CHILDHOOD

1. ESDS FEASIBILITY STUDY: CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES DURING CHILDHOOD IAN PLEWIS and PIERRE WALTHERY UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER PRESENTATION TO E-STAT MEETING BRISTOL, 14 SEPT. 2011

2. STAFFING Pierre Walthery, 0.4 time for 12 months until Jan. 2012. Ian Plewis, 1 day/month until Dec. 2012.

3. UNDERLYING RESEARCH QUESTION To what extent are socio-economic and socio-demographic factors fixed throughout a child’s life and to what extent do these change? The UK is in the fortunate position of having a number of longitudinal datasets that can be used to document these changes. Rarely, however, are even a fraction of these studies brought together to generate a triangulated picture of childhood change.

4. FOCUS OF PROJECT We would like to use e-social science techniques to provide users with: (a) Tools to combine data from a wide range of UK longitudinal data sets. We will assess the available data and metadata in terms of their ability to describe change both with age and across cohorts, to assess how these descriptions might be affected by differing population definitions, sampling and non-sampling errors. (b) Information about the modelling issues involved in conducting a joint analysis of all these data sets to explore the above question.

5. FOCUS OF PROJECT “The project researcher will consult with other members of the project, and with other teams within NcESS, in order to establish how an integrated dataset might be constructed and made available and the outcomes of these deliberations will also be included in the feasibility study report. “

6. STUDIES UNDER CONSIDERATION The three cohort studies curated by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, IOE (1958, 1970 and Millennium), possibly supplemented by the ALSPAC cohort. The British Household Panel Survey (and Understanding Society). The ONS (census-based) Longitudinal Study (ONS LS). The Families and Children Study (FACS). The Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). Relevant administrative datasets such as the National Pupil Database/PLASC.

7. INITIAL FOCUS: FAMILY TYPE OVER TIME Substantive interest: children outcomes across time and cohorts Outcome : toolbox of longitudinal indicators for users to implement: Family composition at each wave (ie father/mother/partner, natural siblings, step/half siblings) Number of changes, year of occurrence, who entered/exited Deliverables: syntax code, recoded dataset, data quality + ‘plugin’ information Issues: least common denominator vs information typically available in most datasets

8. POSSIBLE OUTPUTS • Report on feasibility study. • Additions to existing web resources: • Stata do files to implement in selected datasets • ‘Ready to link’ sample sub datasets • Targeted data quality reports and user guides for selected datasets • Proposals to funding bodies, PhDs etc that exploit thesevariations by age and cohort in substantive contexts. This could also be extended to Extension to international datasets (EU-SILC)

9. E?? How can our work be given an ‘e’ dimension in terms of making resources available to substantive researchers in a way that they would find useful? DAMES? METHODBOX? CCSR WEB PAGES? Downloadable files vs interactive design of datasets