MILLENNIUM COHORT STUDY

The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is a multi-disciplinary research project following the lives of around  19,000 children born in the UK in 2000/1. It is the most recent of Britain’s world-renowned national longitudinal birth cohort studies. The study has been tracking the Millennium children through their early childhood years and plans to follow them into adulthood. The four surveys of MCS cohort members carried out so far – at age nine months, three, five and seven years – have built up a uniquely detailed portrait of the children of the new century. They have also amassed a vast amount of information on the children’s siblings and parents. The study was commissioned by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), whose funding has been supplemented by a consortium of Government departments and the Wellcome Trust. The next sweep of the study is planned for 2012.

MCS’s field of enquiry covers such diverse topics as parenting; childcare; school choice; child behaviour and cognitive development; child and parental health; parents’ employment and education; income and poverty; housing, neighbourhood and residential mobility; and social capital and ethnicity. Its carefully constructed sample (19,517 children in 19,244 families selected through Child Benefit Records) was designed to provide a proper representation of the total population. However, certain sub-groups were intentionally over-sampled, in particular those living in disadvantaged circumstances, children from minority ethnic backgrounds (in England), and youngsters growing up in the smaller countries of the UK, namely Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. As the MCS children were born between September 2000 and January 2002 the study is also well-placed to identify any season-of-birth effect on children’s development.

Three sub-studies have also been undertaken, with two reports produced so far: the Health Visitor Survey Report, and the Fertility Survey Report.

Rationale for the study

Understanding the social conditions surrounding birth and early childhood is increasingly appreciated as fundamental to the study of the whole of the life course. This applies across the range, from the origins of social exclusion through investigation of the influence of early circumstances on health over the life course to providing evidence for major policy initiatives such as "Sure Start". The initiation of the MCS presents an exceptional research opportunity to study the all-important first year of life and potentially resolve many of the issues about its long-term impact. These include issues of central policy interest such as the foundations of social capital and cohesion.

Major questions about the prospects for children born in 2000-1 concern poverty and wealth, the quality of family life and its support by public policy and the broader community. The health and well being of parents and infants will be located in the context of the rich socio-economic data to be collected in the study. Issues to emerge for future sweeps of the cohort will include: advantage and disadvantage in education, health, employment and the parenting of the next generation. Besides changing family forms, there are social and economic changes in the labour market, technology, social polarization, gender roles, and the ideology of individualism. These will make the unfolding lives of the new cohort different from those of their predecessors. Will such changes also be reflected in variation in behaviour, attitudes and expectations among parents? Which of the intricate links between the social and biological aspects of human development can be illuminated?

The Sample

The sample population for the study was drawn from all live births in the UK over 12 months from 1 September 2000 in England & Wales and 1 December 2000 in Scotland & Northern Ireland.  

The sample was selected from a random sample of electoral wards, disproportionately stratified to ensure adequate representation of all four UK countries, deprived areas and areas with high concentrations of Black and Asian families.

The sample design of the MCS differs from that of its predecessors (NCDS & BCS70) in that it took a whole year's births, and covers the whole of the United Kingdom for the first time.  The sample was drawn slightly later in Scotland and Northern Ireland so as not to coincide with other surveys being carried out on families with babies in these areas at the same time.

 Notes

* including 49 groupings of two or three small wards
** provisional totals, all productive contacts
*** partners of main respondent in two parent families