Neighbourhood and family influences on the cognitive ability of children in the British National Child Development Study☆
Section snippets
Data
The National Child Development Study (NCDS) is a study of over 17,000 people in Britain born between the 3 and 9 of March in 1958. Follow-up sweeps took place in 1965, 1969, 1974, 1981 and 1991. The 1991 NCDS follow-up obtained information not only from the cohort member, but from the children of 1 in 3 cohort members and from the mother of these children (Ferri, 1993). In this paper we use data from both children who had a mother who was an NCDS cohort member and children who had a father who
Results
The age of the child is strongly related to the child's family structure (Table 1). Children aged 10 and over are more likely than children aged 4– 5 or 6–9 years to have been born outside partnerships or to have experienced a change in the family situation (Clarke, Di Salvo, Joshi, & Wright, 1997). Table 1 shows that children in older age groups are more likely than younger children to have a cohort member parent with low educational qualifications, to have low family incomes or to live in
Discussion
Our results are similar to those of Brooks-Gunn et al. (1997). In both studies neighbourhood conditions are significant predictors of developmental outcomes around the time of transition to school. We had assumed that the magnitude of neighbourhood effects would increase as children pass from early to middle childhood and from middle childhood to adolescence. Implicit in this assumption is the belief that neighbourhood influences are direct and that they reflect the amount of time children
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Funded under ESRC Programme Children 5–16: Growing into the 21st Century, Grant L129251027 and ESRC Programme Cities and Competitiveness, Grant L130251010.