The 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) is following the lives of an initial 17,415 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of 1958. It started in 1958 at birth, as the Perinatal Mortality Survey.What’s in the study?Over the course of cohort members’ lives, we have collected information on their physical and educational development, economic circumstances, employment, family life, health behaviour, wellbeing, social participation and attitudes.The study has become an invaluable data source on such topics as the effects of socioeconomic circumstances, and child adversities on health, and social mobility. It has also become an important resource for the study of genetics.What has the study found?This study has made influential discoveries about every stage of life. Research has uncovered the wide-reaching negative effects of mothers’ smoking during pregnancy. It has shown how mental health problems develop across childhood and into adult life. It has revealed how economic inequalities are transmitted across generations, and the origins in childhood of health inequalities in middle age. Government, doctors, teachers, charities and others have used findings to develop services and policies that help improve people’s lives.Today the 1958 cohort is one of the best resources in Britain for understanding the lifelong factors affecting retirement and ageing.Who funds the study?NCDS receives core funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.  The most recent NCDS sweep, at age 62, was co-funded by the Medical Research Council, the US National Institutes of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions. Since the initial birth sweep, NCDS cohort members have been followed up 11 times. The latest sweep, at age 62, is now complete. Click on a sweep below to learn more about the information collected.CLS is seeking views on the content of the sweep from experts across the scientific, policy, third, and private sectors. This is an excellent opportunity to ensure the data are fit for purpose to answer key scientific and policy questions about ageing and other issues facing these generations.?View the level of response for every major NCDS sweep. Find out more In addition to the main NCDS sweeps there have been a number of substudies:The NCDS is a birth cohort study. It follows the lives of all people born in England, Scotland and Wales in one particular week of March 1958. The birth sweep collected information about 17,415 newly born babies – an amazing 98 per cent of all the births in Great Britain that week.At 7, 11 and 16, the sample was augmented with those who had been born overseas in the relevant week and subsequently moved to Great Britain. This resulted in a total sample of 18,558 cohort members, who have been followed ever since. There has inevitably been some attrition from the sample, but retention rates over six decades have been very strong.We have collected objective measures of health in both childhood and adulthood.Medical examinations during childhood, at ages 7, 11, and 16, measured height, weight, vision, hearing, speech, and motor coordination, and recorded information on a range of medical conditions.The Age 44 biomedical sweep measured vision, hearing, blood pressure, height, weight, waist and hip circumference and lung function. Non-fasting blood samples were collected and (with consent) immortalised cell lines were created and DNA extracted and stored for medical research purposes. A wide variety of assays of the blood were conducted.These measures, combined with the vast amount of self-reported information about health provided by parents and cohort members throughout life provide researchers with fantastic opportunities to study factors associated with good and poor health throughout the life course.Mental health and wellbeing have been continually assessed from childhood through to mid-life in NCDS.Childhood mental health was assessed via medical examination, parent reports and teacher reports. Mental health has been tracked through adulthood (since age 23) using the ‘Malaise’ scale and other measures (including CIS-R at 44), alongside self-reported measures of depression and other mental health problems.On wellbeing, a life satisfaction scale has been repeatedly measured since age 33 while richer scales of wellbeing have also been more recently included (CASP at 50 and 55, Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale at age 50) This comprehensive suite of measures provide researchers with unparalleled opportunities for studying trajectories of mental health and the interplay between mental health and other domains of life.Partnership histories are available in a longitudinal dataset which contains information about live-in partnerships lasting one month or more, from age 33 to 55.The dataset includes data on partnership type (cohabitation and/or marriage), start and end dates, duration, outcome and if relevant whether divorced and divorce dates. A similar dataset is available for BCS70, which enables users to conduct cross-cohort comparisons.During the childhood sweeps, information was collected about parental occupations, education, employment and income.Cohort members have themselves provided detailed information about their own occupations, education, employment and income during each adult sweep making NCDS ideal for studying patterns of economic and social mobility, within and between generations.The early sweeps of NCDS also collected information about grandparents’ occupation, and at age 62 we aim to find out about the occupations of their children – enabling analysis over four generations. The similar information collected in the other cohort studies gives researchers the opportunity to examine how mobility has changed across successive cohorts.NCDS is a valuable resource for studying the development of cognitive ability during childhood, and cognitive function in adult life, as well as how cognitive abilities impact upon all aspects of life.Cognition was first measured at age 7 and then throughout childhood at ages 11 and 16.In adulthood, basic skills assessments were conducted at age 34, vocabulary assessments were conducted with a sub-sample at age 37 and the Age 50 sweep included assessments of memory, executive function and concentration. The Age 62 sweep will also measure cognition, as will future sweeps, allowing for the study of changes in cognition associated with ageing.In the Age 50 Sweep, cohort members were asked for consent to link health and economic data to the survey data. Cohort members were able to agree to both, one or neither.Some data have now been linked and are available to access:Health Linked health data are available through the UK Data Service. This includes Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) in England for 1997-2017, and we are in the process of updating the data to 2023, including COVID-related ICD-10 codes. Scottish Medical Records (SMR) are also available for 2000-2015 (outpatient, inpatient and day care, maternity, Prescribing Information System).A range of up-to-date linked health data (such as HES, mental health, cancer) for England and Wales are also available to access through the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC).Economic The UK LLC will soon be linking records kept by the Department for Work and Pensions and HM Revenue & Customs, including about benefit claims, participation in employment programmes, jobs, earnings, tax and National Insurance.Three waves of data collection were carried out across NCDS and four other national cohort studies during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Find out more information on the cross-cohort Covid-19 Surveys, including topics covered, response and how to access the data.We’ve published guidance to help users find out what’s in our data.Most NCDS data are available through the UK Data Service. Visit the UK Data Service study page for NCDS [SN 20000032].Our online Bibliography is an excellent resource for finding publications based on data from the NCDS as well as our other three studies. It includes thousands of publications and is searchable by study, year, author, journal name, title and abstract. Phone: 020 7612 6107 Email: g.ploubidis@ucl.ac.uk George is Professor of Population Health and Statistics at the UCL Social Research Institute and currently holds the posts of Principal Investigator of the National Child Development Study and 1970 British Cohort Study at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Prior to joining UCL he held posts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge. George is a multidisciplinary quantitative social scientist and a longitudinal population surveys methodologist. His main research interests relate to socioeconomic and demographic determinants of health over the life course and the mechanisms that underlie generational differences in health and mortality. His methodological work in longitudinal surveys focusses on applications for handling missing data, causal inference and measurement error.Find the latest developments and insights from across all our longitudinal studies.The CLS Bibliography is a searchable database of published work based on our cohort studies. Search by keyword, author, date range and journal.Data from our studies are mainly available through the UK Data Service. We run training to support researchers who are interested in using our studies in their work. Centre for Longitudinal Studies UCL Social Research Institute20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0ALEmail: clsdata@ucl.ac.uk