Cohort Profile: UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS)

(2014) - Roxanne Connelly, L. Platt

Journal: International Journal of Epidemiology
Link::
DOI:: 10.1093/ije/dyu001
Links::
Tags:: #paper #Methods #MCS #Cohort #Cohort-Profile
Cite Key:: [@Connelly2014a]

Abstract

The UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is an observational, multidisciplinary cohort study that was set up to follow the lives of children born at the turn of the new century. The MCS is nationally representative and 18 552 families (18 827 children) were recruited to the cohort in the first sweep. There have currently been five main sweeps of data collection, at ages 9 months and 3, 5, 7 and 11 years. A further sweep of data collection is planned for age 14 years. A range of health-related data have been collected as well as measures concerning child development, cognitive ability and educational attainment. The data also include a wealth of information describing the social, economic and demographic characteristics of the cohort members and their families. In addition, the MCS data have been linked to administrative data resources including health records. The MCS provides a unique and valuable resource for the analysis of health outcomes and health inequalities. The MCS data are freely available to bona fide researchers under standard access conditions via the UK Data Service (http://ukdataservice.ac.uk) and the MCS website provides detailed information on the study (http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/mcs).

Notes

“The UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is an observational, multidisciplinary cohort study that was set up to follow the lives of children born at the turn of the new century. The MCS is nationally representative and 18 552 families (18 827 children) were recruited to the cohort in the first sweep. There have currently been five main sweeps of data collection, at ages 9 months and 3, 5, 7 and 11 years.” (Connelly and Platt, 2014, p. 1719)

“The sample consists of children born throughout the UK between September 2000 and January 2002, and there have been five sweeps of data collection to date” (Connelly and Platt, 2014, p. 1720)

“A key asset of the MCS is that certain sub-groups of the population were intentionally oversampled, namely children living in disadvantaged areas, children of ethnic minority backgrounds and children growing up in the smaller nations of the UK” (Connelly and Platt, 2014, p. 1720)

“. The MCS data also cover topics such as parenting practices, child care arrangements, parental employment, income, housing, family formation and dissolution, cognitive development, educational attainment, behaviour and physical growth, to name but a few” (Connelly and Platt, 2014, p. 1721)