The Millennium Cohort Study is about to conduct its eighth wave of face-to-face interviews with 19,000 young people now turning 22, capturing the moment they leave childhood behind and enter adulthood. This matters because this generation has been followed since infancy, creating an unmatched record of how childhood circumstances shape adult outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic hit them at a critical juncture in education and employment, and this sweep will capture its long-term effects. The study also tracks the evolution of inequalities in mental health and obesity—two major issues that have dogged this cohort since childhood. If successful, the data will inform policy on education, employment, housing, and health for young adults. Policymakers will have evidence on what works in supporting transitions to work, partnership, and parenthood. The study will also establish baseline measures for following this generation through the rest of their adult lives, enabling future research on intergenerational change. This is primarily a data-collection and infrastructure project. Its impact comes from enabling thousands of other researchers to answer questions about how early-life conditions shape adult outcomes—questions that would otherwise remain unanswerable.
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The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is a large, nationally representative birth cohort study following the lives of over 19,000 cohort members since their infancy. The study has now run for seven sweeps, providing an incredibly rich picture of lives of this generation. The cohort is nearing the end of the critical developmental period spanning late childhood to early adulthood, marking a vital point in the life course and a key turning point in the study. This proposal makes the case for an eighth sweep of face-to-face data collection at age 22, and for ongoing support for data enhancements, including through linkages of administrative, geographical and other novel data, to maximise its value and impact. In so doing, it will add to the wealth of data already collected through seven major face-to-face sweeps of data collection (at ages 9 months, 3, 5, 7, 11, 14 and 17 years) and three online COVID-19 surveys (at ages 19, 20). The eighth sweep will be instrumental in studying transitions to adulthood, including in employment, education, partnerships, fertility and residence. It will provide a unique resource for understanding the evolution of inequalities in a range of domains, including in mental health and obesity, which have been major issues facing this generation since childhood. With widespread concern about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on this generation, striking at a time when the cohort are navigating critical transitions in education and the labour market, the new data collection is ideally primed to capture its influences on young people. As the first major adult sweep of the study, it will be critical to establish the constructs and associated measures to include at age 22, since in the interests of longitudinal continuity these will then determine the domains and measures that will be included throughout adulthood. The measures chosen will have the dual objective of combining continuity with innovation, both to facilitate studies of within- and cross-generational change, alongside drawing on the most up to date science and leveraging newly emerging technologies where appropriate. To determine the scientific content of the study, we will take an approach that combines a strong resource-driven model with clear research questions. The major areas we plan to cover include but are not limited to education, learning and investment in skills; employment transitions, economic circumstances, the nature of work; mental health and wellbeing; physical health and health behaviours; psychosocial skills and cognitive development; the role of the family; identity and attitudes; digital connectedness; partnership formation and fertility. We will deposit the data at the UK Data Service within one year of the completion of fieldwork, accompanied by extensive documentation for users to ensure it is widely accessible. We will conduct research on the data to showcase early findings from the study, focusing on highly policy-relevant areas with major gaps in evidence, and will engage with a range of stakeholders including policymakers, the media and third sector in order to maximise impact from the study.
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