Title: Pathways from environmental risk to children's psychological maladjustment and resilience
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: How far does child poverty impair child well-being? What factors weaken the link and protect children from disadvantages? In this project we will test how neighbourhood and family poverty and other adverse circumstances are associated with children's well-being, as gauged through emotional and behavioural outcomes. We will also investigate how factors in the child, family, school and neighbourhood may dampen this association (i.e., promote resilience). To meet these objectives we will use qualitative and quantitative data from the first 4 sweeps of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). We will build on earlier research, including our own. Our theoretical framework recognises that a child's emotional and behavioural functioning is fed by the interaction of the characteristics of the child and of his/her environment in a dynamic process. MCS is a longitudinal survey of more than 19,000 children drawing its sample from children born in the UK over a period of 12 months, beginning on 1/9/2000 in England and Wales, and 3 months later in Scotland and Northern Ireland. At the first 4 sweeps children were aged 9 months, 3 years, 5 years, and 7 years, respectively. MCS has detailed information about children's emotional and behavioural problems and about neighbourhood and family poverty and adversity. We will use children's, teachers', and parents' data as well as objective child measures, such as cognitive ability. We will also use administrative data from the children's schools in order to explore in detail the role of school-wide factors in predicting children's behaviour problems and children's resilience. We will exploit the hitherto under-used geographical potential of MCS by linking in fine-grained external data for the immediate vicinity from small area statistics. The use of low level geography will enable us to look in detail at the role of neighbourhoods in both compromising and promoting child wellbeing. To ensure that the identity of the children and their families is not revealed, the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, which houses MCS, will work in its secure environment to create bespoke datasets which include characteristics of neighbourhoods but not their exact location. One of the factors we will explore as promoting resilience is aspiration. Children were asked at age 7 what they would like to be when they grow up, and their responses have been recorded but not as yet coded for general use. This project will build on some pilot work we have undertaken to code these responses, initially as high or low status, gender typical or atypical, and extrinsic (e.g., aspirations reflecting imagined futures of wealth and fame) or not, and then will test if they exert protective effects on children exposed to high levels of poverty and adversity. We will make the quantitatively coded data on aspirations of all MCS children available through the Data Archive. We will supervise a PhD thesis (using these data) on a related area: the role of aspirations in predicting children's well-being in general, and the role of child, family, school and neighbourhood factors in predicting children's aspirations. We will, therefore, meet our objectives while at the same time we will be building capacity. We will supervise a PhD student but also a number of Master's students undertaking their dissertation projects in the project's areas using the projects' data, and we will employ a full-time post-doctoral research assistant. We will use advanced quantitative techniques to analyse our data, but we will strive to communicate our findings to a wide range of non-academic audiences by actively engaging with the media, offering free training to non-academic users of research, and publishing nontechnical research briefings and overview papers.


Research activity codes: 2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS;1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH