Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE): age 8 UK pilot study

The Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE) age 8 pilot study will test the feasibility of a future large-scale UK child cohort study on child development and well-being to fill a crucial gap in the UK’s data infrastructure and contribute to a major European comparative data infrastructure enabling both national and international research on this important topic. GUIDE is an input harmonised comparative longitudinal survey with a focus on child wellbeing. It has been recognised as an important European research infrastructure having been included on the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure Roadmap (ESFRI 2021). It will collect multi-disciplinary policy-relevant data that will enable research in a variety of fields including children’s well-being and mental health, parenting and childcare, school experiences and performance, cognitive, social and emotional development, out-of-school activities, and wider family, social and environmental contexts. GUIDE will provide long term public benefits by informing evidence-based policy and interventions, aimed at improving children’s lives, and offer unique insights into child wellbeing in the UK and across Europe. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and in an era where understanding and supporting child wellbeing is increasingly recognised as a cornerstone for societal progress (OECD, 2021; UNICEF, 2021), there is a clear scientific and policy need for high-quality longitudinal data to understand child development and wellbeing. The UK has a rich, existing data infrastructure including a planned new UK-wide birth cohort study of children born in the mid-2020s (the Early-Life Cohort or ELC) funded by ESRC, a recent ESRC-funded adolescent cohort study in England (the Covid Social Mobility and Opportunities Study or COSMO) and MRC’s planned adolescent mental health study. These studies will provide robust data on the crucial periods of early childhood and adolescence. However, there is a critical gap in the UK’s data infrastructure on child development and well-being in middle to late childhood and an urgent need for timely and robust UK wide data for research and policy. Although the Department for Education is funding a series of new cohorts (Education and Outcomes Panel Studies or EOPS), these studies are only in England and have a narrower focus on education. This project will conduct a large UK-wide pilot study with a representative sample of 250 families with data collected via an in-person interviewer home visit from 8-year-old children and their main carer. The pilot will utilise the established questionnaires, technical infrastructure and fieldwork processes already developed and successful implemented in pilots in five countries during 2023. The pilot will draw a representative sample in each UK country, with fieldwork undertaken by a specialist agency experienced in longitudinal survey data collection selected via open procurement. This pilot will prepare the UK to join the main GUIDE study which is planned to start in 2027. The age 8 survey is planned as the baseline wave for a longitudinal cohort study which collects data every 3 years until age 24 years. The project will produce a report for prospective UK funders, including UKRI, on the specific value that GUIDE will bring to the UK data infrastructure landscape in terms of science and policy, and a report on the adequacy of the instruments and processes, providing recommendations to the central GUIDE team for the main study. The pilot data will be deposited for research use at the UK Data Service.