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MCS – 9 months – Developmental Milestones

The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s sweep at 9 months age using the Developmental Milestones measures.

Details on these measures and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.


Year of data collection:2001
Domain:Fine and gross motor coordination
Receptive and productive vocabulary
Measures:Developmental milestones using questions from two developmental questionnaires:
8 questions from Denver Developmental Screening Test (DDST) which assesses social and communication skills and fine and gross motor coordination
5 items were chosen from a UK adaptation of MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) identifies early communicative gestures
CHC:N/A
CLOSER Source:Not currently available in CLOSER Discovery
Administrative method:Parent report; face to face computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI)
Procedure:Parents were asked to respond to selected statements from the tests, using a three-point scale: "Often" or "Once or twice", "Not yet" (for the Denver Developmental Screening Test), "Often", "Sometimes", "Not yet" (for the MacArthur CDI).
DDST question topics (gross motor coordination): sitting up without support, standing while holding on to something, walking a few steps unaided, moving about on the floor.

DDST question topics (fine motor coordination): putting hands together, grabbing objects using the whole hand, picking up small objects with forefinger and thumb only, passing a toy between their hands.

CDI question topics: smiling when smiled at, reaching to give an object they are holding, waving when someone leaves, extending arms to show they want to be picked up, nodding head for ‘yes’.
Link to questionnaire:https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/MCS1_CAPI_Questionnaire_Documentation_March_2006_v1.1.pdf (opens in new tab)
Scoring:None available
Item-level variable(s):acsitu00 acstan00 acwalk00 acmove00 (DDST - gross)
achand00 acgrab00 acpick00 acptoy00 (DDST - fine)
acsmil00 acgive00 acwave00 acarms00 acnods00 (CDI)
Total score/derived variable(s):None
Age of participant (days):Mean = 295.5, SD 15.25, Range = 243-382
Descriptives:None available
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Frankenburg, W. K., & Dodds, J. B. (1967). The Denver developmental screening test. The Journal of Pediatrics, 71(2), 181-191.
Fenson L., Dale P., Resnick J., Thal D., Bates E., Hartung J. P. et al. (1993). MacArthur Communicative Inventories. Singular Publishing Group, San Diego.
Technical resources:Johnson, J., Atkinson, M., &
Rosenberg, R. (2015). Millennium Cohort Study: Psychological, Developmental and Health Inventories). Centre for Longitudinal Studies, London. https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Guide-to-Psychological-Inventories-in-MCS3.pdf
Reference examples:Sacker, A., Quigley, M. A., & Kelly, Y. J. (2006). Breastfeeding and developmental delay: findings from the millennium cohort study. Pediatrics, 118(3), e682-e689.

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This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.