Heather Joshi

• M.Litt
• Professor Emeritus at University College London

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unexpected disruptions to Western countries which affected women more adversely than men. Previous studies suggest that gender differences are attributable to: women being over-represented in the most affected sectors of the economy, women’s labour market disadvantage as compared to their partners, and mothers takin...

Gender Wage Gap among Young Adults: A Comparison across British Cohorts. We study the evolution of the gender wage gap among young adults in Britain between 1972 and 2015 using data from four British cohorts born in 1946, 1958, 1970 and 1989/90 on early life factors, human capital, family formation and job characteristics. We account for non-rando...

John Bynner is a leading advocate of considering context in life course research. In this paper I review some of the ways contextual information on time and place may enrich the analysis of individual histories, as well as vice versa. I take three examples from my own research: (1) a late 20th century analysis of adult health and mortality in Brita...

Introduction This book takes up the story of the 19,000 children recruited into the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) at the beginning of the new century, following their progress from birth to primary school. The origins and objectives of the study, along with the results of its first survey, were covered in a companion volume, Children of the 21st...

To round off this collection of contributions we pick out some themes that have emerged from the different aspects of the children's lives covered in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). We then draw together a few implications for the future. The threads running through this volume and this study tell of diversity, mobility and intergenerational tra...

This book documents the first five years of life of the children of the influential Millennium Cohort Study, looking at the children's lives and development as they begin formal education and the implications for family policy, and service planning in health and social services.

This book documents the first five years of life of the children of the influential Millennium Cohort Study, looking at the children's lives and development as they begin formal education and the implications for family policy, and service planning in health and social services.

Purpose School-level characteristics are known to be associated with pupils’ academic and cognitive ability but also their socioemotional development. This study examines, for the first time, whether primary school characteristics are associated with pupils’ affective decision-making too. Methods The sample included 3,141 children participating in...

Residential mobility is a normal feature of family life but thought to be a source of disruption to a child's development. Mobility may have its own direct consequences or reflect families' capabilities and vulnerabilities. This article examines the association between changes of residence and verbal and behavioral scores of children aged 5, contri...

The initiation of a new cohort study of approximately 18,800 UK babies born in the Millennium provides the opportunity to reflect on the circumstances of children in Britain at the start of a new century. Britain has become world-renowned for its tracking of large-scale and representative cohorts of babies from birth, through the rest of their live...

Early childhood is a critical period in the life course, setting the foundation for future life. Early life contexts—neighborhoods and families—influence developmental outcomes, especially when children are exposed to economic and social disadvantage. Residential mobility, frequent among families with pre-school children, may reduce or increase exp...

Ability‐grouping has been studied extensively in relation to children's academic, but not emotional and behavioral outcomes. The sample comprised 7259 U.K. children (50% male) with data on between‐class and within‐class ability‐grouping at age 7. Peer, emotional, hyperactivity, and conduct problems were measured at ages 7, 11, and 14 years. Childre...

Heather Joshi’s presentation to the UCL Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology, 7th June 2021.

This study explored if adolescents’ style of decision-making is related to the sex composition of their friendship groups. Using data on 13,413 members of the Millennium Cohort Study at ages 11 and 14 years, we explored reciprocal associations between decision-making, measured with the Cambridge Gambling Task, and own-sex and other- or mixed-sex co...

We examine change in the size of the gender wage gap for young adults in Britain across three birth cohorts and examine the reasons for change

The paper opens with an illustration of how successive generations of women in my own family have combined motherhood and paid employment since the end of the Nineteenth Century in Britain: an exceptionally well-qualified line of women, fitting in to the dominant male breadwinner norm, enshrined in Beveridge’s National Insurance system. I then turn...

After shrinking dramatically during World War Two the gender wage gap (GWG) narrowed again in the early 1970s due to the Equal Pay Act. The GWG has closed across birth cohorts at all points in the adult life-cycle but remains. Within birth cohort it rises to middle age before falling again. Among those born in 1958, the raw GWG was 16 percentage po...

After closing dramatically during World War Two the gender wage gap (GWG) was roughly constant in the decades prior to the Equal Pay Act. It closed substantially in the mid-1970s due to the Act, but the subsequent rate of narrowing has been very slow, despite improvements in equal opportunities legislation and convergence in men’s and women’s educa...

Using data tracking all those born in a single week in Great Britain in 1958 through to their mid-50s we observe an inverse U-shaped gender wage gap (GWG) over their life-course: an initial gap in early adulthood widened substantially during childrearing years, affecting earnings in full-time and part-time jobs. In our descriptive approach, educati...

There is little research on the role of school and its composition in explaining individual children’s psychological outcomes. This study examined for the first time the role of several primary-school compositional characteristics, and their interactions with individual level characteristics, in the development of two such outcomes, internalising a...

Background: Cognitive ability and problem behaviour (externalising and internalising problems) are variable and inter-related in children. However, it is not known if they mutually influence one another, if difficulties in one cause difficulties in the other, or if they are related only because they share causes. Methods: Random-intercept cross-...

Pathways into and out of conduct problems differ by circumstances experienced since infancy. There is a research gap in understanding how these developmental patterns vary according to the timing and persistence of risk and whether there are differences across ecological domains. This study examines variations in trajectories of conduct problems be...

General cognitive ability (IQ) and problem behavior (externalizing and internalizing problems) are variable and inter-related in children. However, it is unknown how they co-develop in the general child population and how their patterns of co-development may be related to later outcomes. We carried out this study to explore this. Using data from 16...

Gender-specific pathways of conduct problems (CP) from toddlerhood have received little attention. Using a nationally representative sample of UK children born in 2000-2001 (6458 boys and 6340 girls), the current study (a) identified subgroups of CP pathways separately for boys and girls from ages 3 to 11 and (b) examined early precursors (pregnanc...

The topics included in this issue range from the imputation of missing data in longitudinal surveys to demonstrating that their results make a difference in the public arena – both challenges to our research field the world over. Along the way through these pages, the papers include studies of various intergenerational transmissions of social advan...

In a previous paper it has been shown that across three cohorts of men and women born in Britain in 1946, 1958 and 1970 a gender difference exists in regard to relative rates of class mobility. For men these rates display an essential stability but for women they become more equal. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the causes of this...

This paper assesses how far residential moves can result in improvement or deterioration of the housing and neighbourhood circumstances for families with young children. It uses data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study concentrating on the time between infancy and age 5, 2001 to 2006. First, we ask which families moved home and in what circumstance...

Evidence from the United Kingdom Millennium Cohort on children at ages 3 and 5 with older siblings addresses the questions of whether those living with both biological parents and only full siblings have better emotional and behavior outcomes than other children, and whether nonfull siblings affect children's outcomes independently of parents' part...

Information from longitudinal surveys transforms snapshots of a given moment into something with a time dimension. It illuminates patterns of events within an individual’s life and records mobility and immobility between older and younger generations. It can track the different pathways of men and women and people of diverse socio-economic backgrou...

This paper gives an account of the origins, objectives and structure of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) – some 19,000 individuals born in the UK in 2000-2001 – and its use in a wide range of research on many aspects of their lives in childhood years. We highlight some of the mass of output on the first five surveys to age 11 in 2012. Topics discu...

Often young children already have some ideas about what they want to do in the future. Using data from a large UK cohort study, we investigated the individual determinants of seven-year-old children’s aspirations, controlling for parental socio-economic background and parental involvement in learning. At age 7, not all children’s aspirations were u...

Background: Previous evidence indicates that mental health problems are becoming more common for adolescents. Less is known about whether these trends have continued and there has been no study to date which has specifically focused on early adolescents over a sufficiently long period. This study examines changes in parent- and teacher-reported me...

Children’s early years are a time when many families move home. Does residential mobility affect children’s wellbeing at age five in terms of cognitive and behavioural development? The question arises as moving home is sometimes portrayed as a stressful life event adversely affecting child development, particularly if frequent. Other studies sugges...

The British Birth Cohort Studies are multi-purpose, multi-disciplinary longitudinal studies with a host of potential applications, separately or in comparison with each other and with cohort studies in other countries. This chapter illustrates how the data they collect prospectively on social and emotional skills in childhood can be linked to educa...

Using data from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study, we investigated the association of early family socioeconomic disadvantage (measured when cohort children were age three) with children’s aspirations and emotional and behavioural problems at age seven (N = 11,656). Aspirations were gauged by children’s written responses to the question ‘when you gr...

Physical activity (PA) can have a positive influence on mental health. Less is known about the influence of mental health on recent and later PA and sedentariness in childhood. This study investigated cross-sectional and distal associations between behavioural and emotional development, and objectively-measured moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) and se...

Using data from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study, we investigated the association of early family socioeconomic disadvantage (measured when cohort children were age three) with children’s aspirations and emotional and behavioural problems at age seven (N = 11,656). Aspirations were gauged by children’s written responses to the question ‘when you gr...

General cognitive ability ('general intelligence') has been shown to buffer the effects of family adversity and poverty on emotional and behavioural problems in school age children. Yet, little is known about whether it can protect younger children or change the problem trajectories of at-risk children. We modelled simultaneously the effects of fam...

Geoffrey Rose’s prevention paradox obtains when the majority of cases with an adverse outcome come from a population of low or moderate risk, and only a few from a minority ‘high risk’ group. Preventive treatment is then better targeted widely than on the ‘high risk’ minority. This study tests whether the prevention paradox applies to the initiatio...

Social class mobility from grandparent to grandchild is a relatively neglected topic. Grandparents today are often healthier and more active, and have longer relationships with their grandchildren than in previous generations. We used data from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study (n = 8570) to investigate the influence of maternal and paternal grandpa...

This paper addresses the problem of measuring neighbourhood characteristics and change when working with individual level datasets to understand the effects of residential mobility. Currently available measures in Britain are in various respects unsuitable for this purpose. The paper explores a new indicator of small area poverty: the Unadjusted Me...

Using data from a large UK cohort (n = 11,656), we investigated the determinants of 7-year-old children's aspirations, and the role of these aspirations in emotional and behavioural problems, as reported by both parents and teachers. Aspirations were classified to reflect their occupational status, masculinity/femininity and intrinsic/extrinsic mot...

Background A meta-analysis of published data was conducted to investigate the overall risks of hypertension and QTc prolongation in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were receiving vandetanib. Methods A computerized search through electronic databases, including PubMed and Embase (until Dec 2014), was performed to obtain...

Using data from 7,776 Millennium Cohort Study children in England, we examined the role of neighbourhood social fragmentation in trajectories of emotional/behavioural problems at ages three, five and seven, and in moderating the association of children׳s emotional/behavioural problems with neighbourhood poverty, family poverty and adverse family ev...

Background:This paper aims to assess whether 7-year-olds’ physical activity is associated with family and area-level measures of the physical and socio-economic environments. Methods: We analysed the association of environments with physical activity in 6497 singleton children from the UK Millennium Cohort Study with reliable accelerometer data (≥...

Ecological and transactional theories link child outcomes to neighbourhood disadvantage, family poverty and adverse life events. Traditionally, these three types of risk factors have been examined independently of one another or combined into one cumulative risk index. The first approach results in poor prediction of child outcomes, and the second...

This chapter reports on a study examining whether attending single-sex rather than co-educational secondary school made a difference to the lives of a cohort of men and women born in Britain in 1958. The project aimed to assess the impact of single-sex secondary schooling, not just on short-term and narrowly academic outcomes, but also on longer-te...

Early years education has received considerable attention in recent years, particularly as a result of longitudinal studies that demonstrate the importance of the first few years in a child’s development and educational experience. In 2004, a new approach to early years education, the Foundation Phase, was introduced in Wales. This is a major flags...

Socio-economic disadvantage is strongly associated with children's emotional (internalising) and behavioural (externalising) problems. Self-regulation and verbal cognitive ability have been related to children's emotional and behavioural resilience to socio-economic disadvantage. Despite being inter-related, self-regulation and verbal cognitive abi...

Research emphasising the importance of parenting behaviours and aspirations for child outcomes has been seized on by policymakers to suggest the responsibility of the worst off themselves for low levels of social mobility. This article provides a critique of the way in which research evidence has been used to support the dominant policy discourse i...

It has been commonly held that ‘children suffer if their mother goes out to work’. This research uses several studies – large scale longitudinal data – to look at the development of children whose mothers were employed when those children were very young. IOE Research Briefings are short descriptions of significant research findings, based on the w...

To describe levels of physical activity, sedentary time and adherence to Chief Medical Officers (CMO) physical activity guidelines among primary school-aged children across the UK using objective accelerometer-based measurements. Nationally representative prospective cohort study. Children born across the UK, between 2000 and 2002. 6497 7-year-old...

Children born after an unplanned pregnancy have poorer developmental scores. This could arise from less favorable parenting but also could reflect confounding from the socioeconomic circumstances. In a large representative sample in the United Kingdom, the Millennium Cohort Study (2001-2005), cognitive delay at 3 years was explored with the Bracken...

Having many siblings, or none, may impair, or improve, a child’s development compared to being part of a two-child family. Any effect may vary for different aspects of development. This note describes, cross-sectionally, the observed association between child development at ages 3 to 7 years and the number of co-resident siblings, at three sweeps o...

To investigate the biological, social, behavioural and environmental factors associated with non-consent, and non-return of reliable accelerometer data (≥2 days lasting ≥10 h/day), in a UK-wide postal study of children's activity. Nationally representative prospective cohort study. Children born across the UK, between 2000 and 2002. 13 681 7 to 8-y...

There is growing evidence of the health benefits of physical activity for young people, including reduced risk of obesity and improved psychological wellbeing. Conversely, sedentary behaviour is now recognised to increase the risk of later poor health. Patterns of physical activity and sedentary behaviour are established in early childhood. In July...

Age at entry to motherhood is increasingly socially polarised in the UK. Early childbearing typically occurs among women from disadvantaged backgrounds relative to women with later first births. The Millennium Cohort finds differentials in their children's development, cognitive and behavioural, at age 5, by mother's age. These could be due to diff...

This paper considers the question of whether attending a single-sex or co-educational secondary school made any difference to a range of social outcomes for girls and boys at school, and for men and women as they progressed through the life course. We examine these questions using data from a large and nationally representative sample of British re...

One quarter of the 1958 British Birth cohort attended single‐sex secondary schools. This paper asks whether sex‐segregated schooling had any impact on the experience of gender differences in the labour market in mid‐life. We examine outcomes at age 42, allowing for socio‐economic origins and abilities measured in childhood. We find no net impact of...

This paper examines trends in the labour market position of British women and men from 1972 to 2004, using micro data from three British Birth Cohort Studies, of 1946, 1958 and 1970. Women’s rates of employment and hourly pay have been lower than men’s over this period, but generally increasing. Because employment decisions are influenced by the le...

COABRURL101052 Colorado Agriculture Bibliography

This article examines the impact of single-sex schooling on a range of academic outcomes for a sample of British people born in 1958. In terms of the overall level of qualifications achieved, single-sex schooling is positive for girls at age 16 but neutral for boys, while at later ages, single-sex schooling is neutral for both sexes. However, singl...