A Companion to Life Course Studies

The Social and Historical Context of the British Birth Cohort Studies

Michael E.J. Wadsworth, John Bynner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781134005772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Política de salud

Since the end of the Second World War, society has been characterised by rapid and extensive political, economic, scientific, and technological change. Opportunities for education, employment, human relations, and good health, have all been greatly affected by those changes, as have all aspects of life. Consequently, each post-war generation has been like no other before or since.

Britain, uniquely, has five large-scale life course studies that began at intervals throughout that period. They have shown how lives are shaped by individual characteristics, their past and current experiences and opportunities, and so reflect their times. This book describes those fundamental changes that affected life chances differently in each generation, and how governments struggled to accommodate the changes with new policies for improving and managing the nation's capital in terms of education, family policy, health, human rights, and economics.

A Companion to Life Course Studies provides a resource for the interpretation of the findings and design differences in the five studies, and the stimulus for new comparisons of life course between these differing generations that would contribute to policy and to understanding.

1 Introduction

Michael Wadsworth and John Bynner

Introduction

The sixty-five years from the end of the Second World War until 2010 was a period of extensive and continuous change in Britain. It began in a time of national austerity, poor standards of living, food rationing and costly health care, which was much less effective than today. Opportunities were limited for educational attainment and social mobility. The workforce was largely male and the majority was employed in manual work, living in rented accommodation and in families with mostly one earner and two married parents. Historical documentation of the changing times may be seen in The Audit of War (Barnett 1986) and Austerity Britain 1945–1951 (Kynaston 2007). Subsequently radical changes occurred in Beckevery aspect of British life including the nation’s demography, as discussed in Twentieth-Century British Social Trends (Halsey and Webb 2000), and the health and welfare services, described in Empire, Welfare State, Europe (Lloyd 1994). The development of modern institutions and their relation to contemporary identity formation are the subject of Modernity and Self Identity (Giddens 1991). Halpern (2005) describes changing social networks and ties in his Social Capital.

Even during the war the coalition government had been greatly concerned with the question of how to bring change that would effectively be investment in the nation’s human capital. The Beveridge Report published in 1942 expressed the challenge in terms of the pressing need to deal with the five giant evils of physical want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, or in today’s less biblical terms poverty, ill health, poor educational opportunity, substandard housing and unemployment. All of these topics were addressed by the 1945 post-war Labour government’s extensive welfare state programme. That programme, together with the new developments in science and technology that set the pace as key drivers of the economy in the post-war world, brought a great swathe of change in, for example:

• the nature of work and skill acquisition in response to de-industrialisation and to computing technology, which made new demands on education from the earliest ages;

• the growth of the economy, adjustment to globalisation, and de-regulation as well as change in international affiliations from the Commonwealth to the European Union, and increasing competition from Asia;

• growing affluence for ever larger numbers of people during the 1950s and 1960s accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor, and social exclusion concentrated in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and communities;

• increasingly effective health care, reliable control of fertility and improvements in the standards of living, which brought radical change in the age structure of the population and reduction in infant mortality, and changed the timing of parenthood and the nature of family life;

• the nature of communications through the development of television, the internet, and wireless and telephone systems, changing the nature of entertainment and giving unprecedented access to information;

• the expansion of public and personal means of travel, widening outlooks and expectations, the possibilities for migration, the risk of infectious disease transmission, and the range of food available.

By contrast there was greater stability in cultural and political orientations and interests. Although there were fluctuations, the core democratic values and norms remained largely impervious to the pressures of a changing world, and political extremism on continental lines consistently failed to take root.

Over the same post-war period British governments have had to manage the effects of these changes in terms of the consequent demands and expectations for greater equality of opportunity, income, wealth, education and health, for freedom of expression, and for reconsideration of the rights and responsibilities of governments, employers and citizens. Governments of every political persuasion were interventionist, and each was concerned about the continuing development and maintenance of human capital.

For individuals these political, scientific and technological changes profoundly affected ways of life in work, leisure and health expectations, and in perceptions of self, the family, community and society, and increased differences between the generations in family and working life, health and lifestyles. The structure of the life course was also transformed through the prolongation of the time spent in education, the postponement of marriage and partnership, and increasing longevity past retirement. Such fundamental changes promoted the development of ideas about the individual as a free and autonomous agent, no longer necessarily confined, as in the past, by class, gender, family and community, nor by traditional concerns for deference (Giddens 1991). The price to be paid was the growing complexity of the choices to be made in all domains of life and the increased prevalence of globalised risk (Beck et al. 1994) to which Anthony Giddens devoted his 1999 Reith lecture series ‘Runaway World’. This aspect of change was driven by the twin pressures of technological transformation and globalisation, and the ever-rising demand for qualifications. The raising of educational levels and of opportunities for a wider perspective through travel and the internet brought new questions about the basis of contemporary identity and human rights and responsibilities.

This book is concerned with the nature of social and economic changes in the post-war period in Britain, and how they have been experienced in the lives of the population. This is encompassed by the data collected from respondents in the British birth cohort studies, which supply the means of investigating their effects. An introduction to the birth cohort studies follows with their main features summarised. We then turn to the aims of the book, which deal with the nature of national change over the years since the end of the Second World War. Chapter outlines follow in the key areas of politics and citizenship, family structure and policy, educational policy, economic policy, labour market, employment and skills, health and health care and the changing pattern of leisure.

Measuring social change

Britain has a long tradition of measuring societal change as an essential means of showing its course and extent, interpreting its causes, arguing the need for policy change and making decisions about how to accommodate and adapt to it. Starting in 1801 and taking its modern form in 1841 when details of all household members were recorded, the census has provided data about the current state of the nation. Governments have used registration data to produce population vital statistics on births, deaths, marriage and health, and have used the census and other forms of inquiry to collect what is now an extensive range of information on housing, the economy, industry and the workforce. In addition, governments have undertaken inquiries involving research and the collection of expert views on complex topics on which to base policy initiatives that affect the whole nation. For example, the Central Advisory Council for Education established by the 1944 Education Act undertook a series of enquiries including the Crowther Report (1959) on secondary education, the Newsom Report (1963) on those who left school at the earliest opportunity, the Robbins Report (1963) on higher education and the Plowden Report (1967) on primary education. These follow in the tradition of earlier major enquires such as those commissioned by the influential Inter Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904), and Royal Commissions on Children’s Employment (1840), the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress (1909), the Distribution of the Industrial Population (1940), the Taxation of Incomes and Profits (1952), the Distribution of Wealth and Income (1979) and the Long-Term Care for the Elderly (1999).

There is an equally long British tradition of data collection by individuals and non-governmental groups concerned with measuring living conditions, work opportunities and health. This work has been used to inform political arguments and to provide evidence of the need for change, particularly for improvement in social and economic circumstances and in health. Amongst the most influential of these were the data collections and publications of Booth (1891, first published in 1889) and Rowntree (1901) on poverty and its causes, the Carnegie Trust report Disinherited Youth (1943, first published in 1939) and, of more recent times, the work of charitable organisations including the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Wolfson Foundation and the Sutton Trust.

During the years between the two World Wars it was clear from the national statistics that fertility had been falling in Britain since the middle of the nineteenth century. Anxieties were expressed about the social implications of that trend (Beveridge 1925; Charles 1934; Carr-Saunders 1936; Glass 1946), and about the slow rate of fall in infant mortality (Titmuss 1943). These reports prompted the setting up in 1944 of the Royal Commission on Population (1949). An academic group, the Population Investigation Committee (PIC), was a considerable source of impetus and support for the Royal Commission. It also raised money from the Nuffield Foundation in 1945, while the Commission was still sitting, to set up a national study that would throw more focused light on the problems of fertility and infant mortality.

The PIC study was designed to show the national distribution and availability of maternity services to different socio-economic groups, the use of those services and their effectiveness in educating mothers and reducing infant and maternal ill health and mortality, the cost to families of childbirth, and the need for domestic help during pregnancy and the early neonatal period. Its findings were of relevance to the planners of the National Health Service that was to start in 1948. The study collected data in 1946 and published its findings in 1947 and 1948 (Joint Committee 1947, 1948). Its principal investigators, James Douglas and David Glass, then decided to follow up a national sample of those births in order to explore their subsequent health, growth and survival in relation to their health and family circumstances and care at birth (Wadsworth 2010).

Although the initial survey was planned as a single study, with the focus on health at the time of birth, this was to become the first of a series of British national lifelong longitudinal birth cohort studies inaugurated during the sixty-five year period reviewed in this book. It was an important development in the national tradition of studies of societal circumstances and poverty and its effects because it introduced the dynamic element of developmental time or change with age into what had previously been a tradition of ‘snapshot’ cross-sectional studies, as discussed in The Dynamics of Modern Society (Leisering and Walker 1998) and From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion (Welshman 2007). By introducing developmental time the first study provided data that was uniquely useful for policy and also for research into the interaction between societal change and individual development and change with age. It made it possible to address questions about, for example, how many and what kind of people escape from the constraints of a childhood spent in poverty.

This method of enquiry, beginning with the birth of its subjects, and continuing the study of them throughout life, has been used in five large-scale studies (four of them national) that began at intervals during the sixty-five years since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the welfare state. Because of their concern with questions appropriate for policy, as well as research into development and change with age, the five studies map onto the history of many of the major policy questions and the progress of the study of individual development and health during the post-war period.

The national birth cohort studies

The first national birth cohort study began in 1946 and this was followed by four others; as Table 1.1 shows they cover the post-war years.

Table 1.1 Periods and ages of data collection up to 2011 in the five British large-scale birth cohort studies^a (see Appendix 1 for more details of the studies)

Notes

n sample size at the beginning of the study.

a 1946 cohort – MRC National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD); 1958 cohort – The National Child Development Study (NCDS); 1970 cohort – British Birth Cohort 1970 (BCS70); 1991–2 – Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC); 2000–1 – The Millennium Cohort Study.

The design of each study and the nature of the measures and instruments used in the data collections have been responsive to the changing nature of the research and policy questions throughout the period. Although initially limited by the available information technology, it became possible for the studies to increase sample size. Sample design also had to respond to the population’s changing socio-economic and ethnic mix, and the demand for more detailed developmental, psychological and health measures. Scientific and methodological development and innovation required the use of the most up-to-date measurement methods and ins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Front matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Politics, citizenship and social capital
• 3. Family structure and family policy and practice
• 4. Education policy and practice
• 5. Economic policy and practice
• 6. Labour market, employment and skills
• 7. Health policy and health care
• 8. Leisure
• 9. Generation and change in perspective
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Index