Early family risk, school context, and children's joint trajectories of cognitive ability and mental health

认知能力和心理健康都是儿童功能的重要方面，每个方面都显示出优势家庭和弱势家庭之间的梯度，每个方面都对一系列结果产生长期影响。它们也是相互交织的，尽管有些孩子可能在其中一种上比另一种表现得更好。这个项目将1)探索迄今为止未知的在普通人群中从小学早期到小学毕业的平行发展模式；2)将这些模式与幼儿期家庭环境中的资源和风险联系起来；3)将它们与后来（青少年）的结果联系起来，4)探索小学在这种平行展开中的作用，以及在这种平行展开中加强或补偿个人特征和早期家庭风险的作用。该项目将使用最先进的统计工具，利用来自千年队列研究（MCS）和儿童就读的英国学校的数据。我们将对2000/01年度出生的1.9万多名儿童进行跟踪调查，这些儿童的年龄分别为9个月、3岁、5岁、7岁、11岁和14岁。我们将从3岁、5岁、7岁和11岁的MCS中获取认知能力（主要用英国能力量表测量）和心理健康（用优势和困难问卷测量）的信息。早期家庭风险（即婴儿期至3岁）将由社会经济劣势、母亲抑郁、父母低参与、家庭混乱、亲子互动不良、单亲和父母教育水平低等因素来总结。我们将研究14岁青少年的结果，如学习成绩、药物使用、性行为、反社会行为、欺凌、同伴受害和主观幸福感。小学环境将反映学校构成（学生群体的人口和社会构成），其“质量”（由学校水平成就和学校水平学生缺勤的学校构成变量衡量）以及课程是否被组织成能力小组。为保密，我们会作出特别安排，查阅和分析来自学校的资料。在我们工作的第一部分，我们将展示认知能力和心理健康的平均时间趋势（成长轨迹）以及这两个结果在3岁到11岁之间的整体纵向关联。这也将使我们能够研究儿童时期的认知能力和心理健康如何相互影响。我们还将寻找任何具有明显变化或增长模式的特定群体。其次，我们将探讨早期家庭风险在这些轨迹中的作用。研究的第三部分将是这些轨迹在青少年结果中的作用。第四，我们将探讨学校环境在这些轨迹中的作用，以及在缩小或相反地扩大高风险家庭和低风险家庭之间的差距方面的作用。研究结果将有助于争论：未能解决儿童的心理健康问题是否限制了他们充分发挥智力；将提供证据，证明认知能力和心理健康对儿童学业成绩的相对重要性，以及学校在多大程度上纠正或扩大儿童生活机会的差异。我们的项目将创造知识，也将创造能力。我们会透过研究生的参与和提供的培训课程，提高分析MCS和类似数据来源的能力。我们也会与纵向研究中心（MCS的所有者）联系，通过增加儿童学校的数据来加强MCS。我们将通过积极参与媒体，为研究的非学术用户提供免费培训，以及发布非技术研究简报和概述论文，努力将我们的发现传达给广泛的非学术受众。

Cognitive ability and mental health are both important aspects of child functioning, each shows gradients between advantaged and disadvantaged families, and each has long-term effects on a range of outcomes. They are also inter-twined, although there may be some children who fare better on one rather than the other. This project will 1) explore the hitherto uncharted patterns of their parallel unfolding, in the general population, from the early years to the end of primary school; 2) relate these patterns to the resources and risks in the family setting in early childhood; 3) link them to later (adolescent) outcomes, and 4) explore the role of primary school in this parallel unfolding and in reinforcing or compensating for the roles of individual characteristics and early family risk in this parallel unfolding. The project will use state-of-the-art statistical tools to exploit data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and the schools, in England, which the children attended. We will follow more than 19,000 children born in 2000/01 and surveyed at ages 9 months, and 3, 5, 7, 11 and 14 years.We will take information on cognitive ability (measured, primarily, with the British Ability Scales) and mental health (measured with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) from MCS at ages 3, 5, 7 and 11. Early family risk (i.e., infancy to age 3) will be summarized by factors such as socio-economic disadvantage, maternal depression, low parental involvement, household chaos, poor parent-child interaction, single parenthood and low parental education. We will look at age 14 adolescent outcomes, such as academic performance, substance use, sexual behaviour, antisocial behaviour, bullying, peer victimisation and subjective well-being. The primary school context will reflect school composition (the demographic and social make-up of the student body), its 'quality' (measured by the school compositional variables of school-level achievement and school-level pupil absenteeism) and whether lessons are organized into ability groups. To preserve confidentiality, special arrangements will be made to access and analyse the data from schools. In the first part of our work, we will show the average time trend (growth trajectory) of cognitive ability and mental health and the overall longitudinal association between these two outcomes from ages 3 to 11. This will also allow us to investigate how cognitive ability and mental health in childhood may affect each other. We will also look for any specific groups with distinct patterns of change or growth. Secondly, we will explore the role of early family risk in these trajectories. A third part of the study will be on the role of these trajectories in adolescent outcomes. Fourth, we will explore the role of the school context both in these trajectories and in closing or, conversely, widening the gaps between higher and lower risk families.The results will contribute to the debate about whether failure to address children's mental health difficulties limits their making the best of intellectual abilities; will contribute evidence on the relative importance of cognitive ability and mental health for children's school achievement, and about how far schools redress or widen differences in children's life chances. Our project will create knowledge but also capacity. We will enhance the capacity to analyse the MCS and similar data sources through the involvement of graduate students and the training courses offered. We will also liaise with the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (the owner of MCS) to enhance MCS through adding data on children's schools. We will strive to communicate our findings to a wide range of non-academic audiences by actively engaging with the media, offering free training to non-academic users of research, and publishing non-technical research briefings and overview papers.