Amanda Sacker

University of Essex · Institute for Social and Economic Research

Background: Maternal depression is a major determinant of offspring mental health. Yet, little is understood about how the duration and timing of maternal depression shapes youth risk for depressive symptoms, which if understood could inform when best to intervene. This study aimed to determine how the timing and duration of maternal depression wa...

Objectives In mid-adolescence, to 1) examine cyclical associations between social media use and mental ill health by investigating longitudinal and bidirectional associations, dose response relationships, and changes in social media use and in mental health; 2) assess potential interaction effects between social media use and mental health with pre...

Many countries have implemented policies to extend working lives in response to population ageing, yet there remains little understanding of what drives paid work in later life, nor how this is changing over time. This paper utilises the 1988/89 Survey of Retirement and Retirement Plans, the 1999 British Household Panel Survey and the 2008 English...

Background: Autism can be diagnosed from 2 years of age, although most autistic people receive their diagnosis later than this after they have started education. Research is required to understand why some autistic children are diagnosed late, and the level and nature of unmet need prior to diagnosis for late-diagnosed children. Methods: We exam...

Background: Maternal depression influences offspring mental health. Yet little is understood about how the duration and timing of maternal depression shapes youth risk for depressive symptoms, which if understood could inform when best to intervene. Consequently, this study aimed to determine how the timing and duration of maternal depression was r...

The association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and dementia is well studied. However, scant attention has been given to the relationship with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), often considered a transient state between normal cognition and dementia. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of various SEP markers such as education an...

Background Children who spent time in non-parental care report poor outcomes in many aspects of their later lives on average, but less is known about differences by type of care. We examined whether socioeconomic, family, and living arrangements of adults who had been in non-parental care across the first three decades of adult life varied by type...

Background The association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and dementia is well studied. However, scant attention has been given to the relationship with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), often considered a transient state between normal cognition and dementia. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of various SEP markers such as e...

Birth order may foster specific roles for individuals within the family and set in train a dynamic that influences the development of specific behaviors. In this paper, we explored the relationship between birth order, sex, timing of sexual initiation, and its consequences for risky sexual behavior and sexual health. We conducted a path analysis to...

This webinar launched the Nuffield-funded report The lifelong health and well-being trajectories of people who have been in care, a report on the findings from and implications of research by a team at University College London and Kings College London. The study used data on more than 350,000 people, including some 5,700 who spent time in care as...

The overarching aim of the Looked-after Children Grown Up Project (LACGro) was to use the unique data in the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study to build a comprehensive picture up to mid-life of the health and social functioning of care experienced members of the study. To achieve that, we set ourselves a number of objectives: • To d...

This study uses multi-channel sequence analysis to characterize work-family life course types between the ages of 16 and 42, and multivariable logistic regression to examine their association with psychological distress at age 42/43 for men and women in three nationally-representative British birth cohorts born in 1946 (N = 2,858), 1958 (N = 9,140)...

Background Children who spent time in non-parental care report poor outcomes in many aspects of their later lives on average, but less is known about differences by ethnicity. We examined whether the health, socioeconomic, family, and living arrangements of adults who had been in non-parental care across the first three decades of adult life varied...

Objectives To examine if gestational age groups predict the development of social competence difficulties (SCDs) from childhood into mid-adolescence and to assess the mediation by maternal psychological distress during infancy on these trajectories. Design Nationally representative population-based birth cohort (UK Millennium Cohort Study). Parti...

Objectives Exposures to adverse events are associated with impaired later-life psychological health. While these associations depend on the type of event, the manner in which associations for different event types depend on when they occur within the life course has received less attention. We investigated associations between counts of adverse eve...

Lay abstract: Children with autism spectrum disorder are at increased risk of depression and self-harming behaviours. The question of whether timing of diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is associated with these consequences in adolescence has not yet been studied. This exploratory study aimed to explore the association between depression and s...

Background: Preterm birth and maternal psychological distress are associated with an increased risk for social competence difficulties; however, little is known about how this risk changes over time and across gestational age. This study aimed to examine mean developmental trajectories of social competence difficulties from early childhood to mid-a...

This study aimed to identify determinants of a late autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, including diagnoses made ‘very late’ (i.e., in adolescence), using the Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative population-based cohort in the United Kingdom. Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder by age 14 (N = 581) were included and grou...

Changes in paid labor in families have occurred within the wider context of societal changes in gendered attitudes to work. However, changes in behavior and attitudes are not necessarily correlated with each other, and their associations with family relationships are complex. This study uses data from over 12,000 two-parent families in the U.K.’s M...

This article uses data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study to describe how contemporary British couples divide a range of work types. Our findings support the hypothesis, suggested by previous authors, that a shared egalitarian ideology is required for gender equality in divisions of work. In response to bargaining theories, the article also h...

Overcrowding has been regarded as indicating material deprivation and treated as a proxy measure for individual socioeconomic status. Conventionally, ‘persons per room’ (PPR) has been employed to identify overcrowded households in UK survey data, though the ‘bedroom standard’ (BS) approach or the ‘modified bedroom standard’ (MBS) approach has been...

A large body of literature has shown marked differences in the average levels of resources and child well-being across different family structures. Studies have examined cognitive, educational and behavioural outcomes; less is known about differentials in physical health, and about dynamics in early childhood. Furthermore, up to the present time, l...

Internalising and externalising behaviours may have heterogeneous patterns across childhood. Different aspects of young children's proximal family environments may influence these behavioural profiles. Previous studies have used indicators of family instability at one point in time or collapsed several indicators into an index. We assess whether pa...

Evidence suggests that health-related behaviours (HRBs) cluster in mid-adulthood and are associated with social circumstances (i.e. economic circumstances, cultural norms, employment relations) at the same age. However, little is known about the level of stability in HRB cluster membership during mid-adulthood and how social circumstances in early...

Background Evidence suggests social media use is associated with mental health in young people but underlying processes are not well understood. This paper i) assesses whether social media use is associated with adolescents' depressive symptoms, and ii) investigates multiple potential explanatory pathways via online harassment, sleep, self-esteem a...

Background Many studies done in England have shown that, with better socioeconomic conditions, individual healthy ageing can be achieved and maintained. Only a few studies, however, have attempted to identify the most sensitive socioeconomic determinants of healthy ageing. We aimed to create a comprehensive measure of healthy ageing for the English...

Objectives The incidence of oral cancer has been rapidly increasing in India, calling for evidence contributing to a deeper understanding of its determinants. Although disadvantageous life‐course socioeconomic position (SEP) is independently associated with the risk of these cancers, the explanatory mechanisms remain unclear. Possible pathways may...

Existing literature suggests that mixed race/ethnicity children are more likely to experience poor socioemotional wellbeing in both the US and the UK, although the evidence is stronger in the US. It is suggested that this inequality may be a consequence of struggles with identity formation, more limited connections with racial/ethnic/cultural herit...

Purpose of the study: Few studies have recommended the essential domains of healthy aging and their relevant measurement to assess healthy aging comprehensively. This review is to fill the gap, by conducting a literature review of domains and measures of healthy aging in epidemiological studies. Design and methods: A literature search was conduc...

Background: Adolescents are among the highest consumers of social media while research has shown that their well-being decreases with age. The temporal relationship between social media interaction and well-being is not well established. The aim of this study was to examine whether the changes in social media interaction and two well-being measure...

Building upon evidence linking socio-economic position (SEP) in childhood and adulthood with health-related behaviours (HRB) in adulthood, we examined how pre-adolescent SEP predicted membership of three HRB clusters: "Risky", "Moderate Smokers" and "Mainstream" (the latter pattern consisting of more beneficial HRBs), that were detected in our prev...

Background: Legislation places an onus on local authorities to be aware of care needs in their locality and to prevent and reduce care and support needs. The existing literature overlooks ostensibly ‘healthy’ and/or non-users of specific services, non-health services and informal assistance and therefore inadequately explains what happens before or...

Using a simulation study, the performance of complete case analysis, full information maximum likelihood, multivariate normal imputation, multiple imputation by chained equations and two-fold fully conditional specification to handle missing data were compared in longitudinal surveys with continuous and binary outcomes, missing covariates, and an i...

Background: Social and policy changes in the last several decades have increased women's options for combining paid work with family care. We explored whether specific combinations of work and family care over the lifecourse are associated with variations in women's later life health. Methods: We used sequence analysis to group women in the Engl...

Social exclusion is a dynamic multi-dimensional process that is interactive in nature. The complex interplay between domains, whereby each domain can act as a determinant, indicator and/or outcome of social exclusion, hinders understanding of the process and the mechanisms through which social exclusion exists. This article highlights the need to d...

Purpose: Previous research on time trends of young people's mental health in Britain has produced conflicting findings: evidence for deterioration in mental health during the late 20th century followed by stability and slight improvement during the early 21st century is contrasted with evidence showing continued deterioration. The present study ad...

Background Despite the recent policy push to keep older adults in the labour force, we know almost nothing about the potential health consequences of working longer. Drawing on a life course approach that considers stability and change in employment patterns, this study examines the relationship between long-term labour market involvement in later...

Purpose: Engaging in exploratory risky behaviors and experiencing poor mental health during early adolescence are important markers for poor health during adulthood. Prior research suggests protective effects from cognition, but less is known about the associations between early childhood cognition and early adolescent psychosocial well-being, as...

PPI Briefing Note 95 - What difference does a year make? This Briefing Note follows on from PPI Briefing Note 84. It provides an overview of the different work and family lifecourses for men and women and aims to understand how gender variations in the lifecourse affect income in retirement. See: http://wherl.ac.uk/findings/ppi-briefing-note-95-w...

Background To assess relationships between age at first birth and cardiovascular risk factors in a large longitudinal study of men and women. By assessing associations for both genders, we were able to investigate biological versus social and behavioural explanations from early life through to adulthood. Methods Multiply-imputed data on more than...

The Wellbeing, Health, Retirement and the Lifecourse project (WHERL) This research project investigates ageing, work and health across the lifecourse. This 3 year interdisciplinary consortium is funded by the cross-research council Lifelong Health and Wellbeing (LLHW) programme under the Extending Working Lives initiative. It examines a crucial que...

Background Given the current policy emphasis in many Western societies on extending working lives, we investigated the health effects of being in paid work beyond state pension age (SPA). Until now, work has largely focused on the health of those who exit the labour force early. Methods Our data come from waves 2–4 of the English Longitudinal Stud...

Background: Given the acceleration of population ageing and policy changes to extend working lives, evidence is needed on the ability of older adults to work for longer. To understand more about the health impacts of work, this study examined the relationship between employment histories before retirement and trajectories of frailty thereafter. M...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Combining work and family responsibilities has previously been associated with improved health in mid-life, yet little is known about how these associations change over time (both biographical and historical) and whether this extends to body mass index (BMI) trajectories for British men and women. The purpose of this study was...

Purpose: Substantial evidence supports the hypothesis that parental well-being impacts upon child well-being and that this relationship is bidirectional. Here we explore how, in a large, nationally representative sample, both parents' mental distress relates over time to each other's mental distress and to their adolescent child's unhappiness, and...

The recent push to keep older adults in the labour force glosses over who is likely to follow what kind of employment trajectory and why. In this paper, we broaden understandings of later-life labour market involvement by applying a comparative gendered life course perspective. Our data come from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europ...

Background: Development of verbal skills during early childhood and school age years is consequential for children's educational achievement and adult outcomes. We examine ethnic differences in longitudinal latent verbal profiles and assess the contribution of family process and family resource factors to observed differences. Methods: Using dat...

Using large longitudinal survey data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, this article estimates the relationship between maternal time inputs and early child development. We find that maternal time is a quantitatively important determinant of skill formation and that its effect declines with child age. There is evidence of long-term effects of ear...

Objective Early puberty in girls is linked to some adverse outcomes in adolescence and mid-life. We address two research questions: (1) Are socioeconomic circumstances and ethnicity associated with early onset puberty? (2) Are adiposity and/or psychosocial stress associated with observed associations? Design Longitudinal data on 5839 girls from th...

The aim was to investigate whether the combined work-family life courses of British men and women were associated with differences in metabolic markers—waist circumference, blood pressure, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides, and glycated haemoglobin—in mid-life. We used data from the Medical Research Council’s National Survey of He...

Descriptive statistics of analysis variables by work-family type for NSHD men. (DOCX)

Further information on sequence analysis. (DOCX)

Descriptive statistics of analysis variables by work-family type for NSHD women. (DOCX)

In the publication of this article [1], the Acknowledgements section failed to include the following: “The alcohol use and attitudes variables in MCS5 were co-funded by grant AA013606 from the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism”. [1] Kelly Y, et al. What influences 11-year-olds to drink? Findings from the Millennium Cohort Stud...

Heavy drinking among young people is linked to negative consequences including other risky behaviours, educational failure and premature mortality. There is a lack of research examining factors that influence heavy and binge drinking in early adolescence as prior work has focused on older teenagers. The objective of this paper was to identify indiv...

Research findings indicate that health-related behaviours (HRBs) do not co-occur within individuals by chance and therefore cluster. This study uses Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), to identify the clustered patterns and their prevalence of four HRBs: smoking, alcohol, diet and physical activity. We used data, collected when participants were in thei...

Background Drinking in youth is linked to other risky behaviours, educational failure and premature death. Prior research has examined drinking in mid and late teenagers, but little is known about the factors that influence drinking at the beginning of adolescence. Objectives were: 1. to assess associations of parental and friends’ drinking with re...

Background: The population of mixed ethnicity individuals in the UK is growing. Despite this demographic trend, little is known about mixed ethnicity children and their problem behaviours. We examine trajectories of behavioural problems among non-mixed and mixed ethnicity children from early to middle childhood using nationally representative coho...

Adiposity and height are known to correlate in childhood but it is less clear whether height and weight gain occur in synergy. We investigate the bidirectional relationships between measures of height and body mass index (BMI) - an indicator of adiposity - and their rates of change. The sample comprises singleton children in the Millennium Cohort S...

Introduction: Life course experiences in the labour market and the family have long been recognised as consequential for understanding later-life employment and retirement patterns. This paper describes the analytical approach we adopt to summarise detailed labour market, marital and parental histories for cohorts of older adults in Britain. Method...

Background: There is limited evidence on which risk factors attenuate income inequalities in child overweight and obesity; whether and why these inequalities widen as children age. Method: Eleven thousand nine hundred and sixty five singletons had complete data at age 5 and 9384 at age 11 from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Overweight (age 5...

Background: Previous studies have found generally better health among those who combine employment and family responsibilities; however, most research excludes men, and relies on subjective measures of health and information on work and family activities from only 1 or 2 time points in the life course. This study investigated associations between...

Studies investigating the impact of combining paid work and family life on wellbeing have generally used information at one or a limited number of points in the life course, and have mainly focused on women. This study uses multi-channel sequence analysis to characterise work-family life courses across adulthood (ages 16– 60) for more than 1500 men...