In this section we outline the data sources used for the UK studies reviewed, with a view to identifying potentially useful sources of information for the design of future interventions and policy. In the main, the UK studies reviewed either made use of data from existing large national cohort studies, or conducted their own surveys focused on a particular cohort. The national cohort studies used include the following:
Belfast Youth Development Study, a prospective study of 1,000 families conducted over ten years and focused specifically on substance misuse of children and parents (McLaughlin et al., 2015).
Millennium Cohort Study, a study of 19,000 children born across the UK between 2000-01 (Sabates and Dex, 2015)
Health Survey for England and the General Household Survey, both UK government sponsored (McLaughlin et al., 2015)
Children in need census, data collected by the UK government on all children referred to local authority care services due to their health or development being put at risk (Department for Education, 2018).
Whitehall II study, a cohort of over 10,000 participants working in the British Civil Service in 1985, from whom data regarding psychosocial factors and health conditions is collected every two to five years (Leung, Britton and Bell, 2015). Cohort studies conducted specifically for the studies reviewed include:
a nationally representative household survey of 3,884 English adults focused on measuring mental wellbeing and retrospective exposure to ACEs (Hughes et al., 2016)
a cross-sectional survey of 5,454 adults living in Hertfordshire, Luton and Northamptonshire to determine retrospective exposure to ACEs as well as health-harming behaviours and mental wellbeing (Ford et al., 2016).