The thirteenth seminar in the CLOSER Longitudinal Methodology Series featured talks from Natasha Wood and Noriko Cable. Dr Natasha Wood is a Research Assistant at the MRC Unit for Lifelong Healthy Ageing at UCL. Dr Noriko Cable is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Life Course Studies in Society and Health, UCL. Natasha discussed her CLOSER work investigating prospective associations between childhood environment and adult mental wellbeing. Noriko talked about her CLOSER funded work investigating overcrowding and health.
Speakers
Dr Natasha Wood
Cross cohort analysis of childhood environment and adult mental wellbeing
Little evidence exists on the association between the social environment experienced in childhood and adult mental wellbeing and whether this has changed for different generations. The aim of this CLOSER work package is to investigate the association between childhood circumstances and adult mental wellbeing in four birth cohorts: the National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS), the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), and the Hertfordshire Cohort Study (HCS).
This talk will describe some of the challenges of carrying out cross-cohort analysis and attempting comparability of the childhood environment measures across the cohorts. We also present findings providing consistent evidence that the childhood psychosocial environment is associated with adult mental wellbeing, despite issues of direct comparability on some of the measures.
Dr Noriko Cable
Overcrowding and Health: Harmonisation and research application
Overcrowding has long been treated as a proxy indicator of material deprivation. ‘Persons per room’ (PPR) has been used in the UK census to indicate overcrowding and can be easily derived from measures in UK survey data. In contrast, both ‘Bedroom standard’ (BS) and ‘Modified bedroom standard’ approaches apply a set of rules to allocate a bedroom to each household member to identify overcrowded households. The primary aim of this CLOSER funded work package is to offer comparable overcrowding measures across birth cohort studies and household panel studies in Great Britain.
This talk will address harmonising work undertaken for this work package as well as validation work and cross-cohort analyses of examining the longitudinal associations between overcrowding and health. The work will inform usefulness of existing secondary longitudinal datasets and historical and socioeconomic contexts of overcrowding across time.