The 1990s-born child cohort: evidence from the ONS Longitudinal Study

Louisa Blackwell and Bola Akinwale, Office for National Statistics

[Project number 20093]

This proposal is a response to the call for abstracts for the International Conference on Child Cohort Studies to be held in Oxford in September 2006. Papers should describe studies whose subjects are born within a decade either side of the year 2000.

The thirty year span of the LS permits cohort comparisons. For example, LS members born in the ten years before the 2001 Census can be compared with cohorts born in the decades before the 1991 and 1981 Censuses. Comparison between the information provided at birth registration and at Census can inform studies of, for example, social and geographic mobility and changes in household structure at ages up to ten years. Linkage of data on the characteristics of neighbourhoods into which the children were born (e.g. Carstairs deprivation scores) provides further information on trajectories in the first decade of life and the family and household characteristics associated with differential life chances. The project will describe the characteristics of LS members born in the ten years to 2001 and compare them with those born in earlier decades. Logistic regression will be used.

Intergenerational trends can be analysed through an alternative methodological approach. The characteristics of children born to LS members in the decade up to the 2001 Census can be compared with those of their mothers when they were children. This will be illustrated with an example showing the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage among young mothers (under 23 years) who gave birth in the 1990s.

The project used the following census and events data:

Births of LS member 1981 to 2001
Births to LS member 1991 to 2001
Deaths of LS member 1981 to latest available
Embarkations 1981 to latest available
Re-entries 1991 to 2001

This project was approved on 27 October 2005 and was supported by ONS.