About the research
This project will help researchers to more accurately explore the links between cognitive ability, social background and education. The project team will test the reliability of current cognitive measures when used to investigate relationships between a range of cognitive outcomes, including educational attainment and health.
This project will capitalise on the harmonisation work of previous CLOSER research projects, such as the harmonisation of education and social class data, to assess the intersection between cognitive test scores, education and socio-economic position over time, and the implications this has for wider inequalities. The findings of this project will provide guidance for researchers and analysts wanting to use these measures, as well as being valuable for future data collection by identifying which cognitive measures are likely to add the most value to future datasets.
A wealth of cognitive measures (such as those measuring skill at reading or arithmetic) have been collected through childhood and adult life by the British birth cohort studies. This will be the first project to organise and compare the cognitive measures used between different studies and different sweeps of the same study.
Research lead
Ms Vanessa Moulton (Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL)
Studies used
- 1946 MRC National Survey of Health and Development
- 1958 National Child Development Study
- 1970 British Cohort Study
- Millennium Cohort Study
- Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children
Research outputs
- Dataset of derived cognitive measures and harmonised measures where possible, with accompanying documentation.
Resource reports
- Resource report containing guidance on the cognitive tests included in the cohort studies.
Papers
Published paper illustrating how harmonised cognitive measures can be used across the cohorts.
Read about other CLOSER data harmonisation projects.
