In the latest episode of 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox delves into the fascinating world of longitudinal studies with George Ploubidis, Professor of Population Health and Statistics at University College London. George offers invaluable insights into how these studies shape our understanding of health, economic circumstances, employment, family life and wellbeing across the life course. They discuss how large-scale, population-based surveys like the 1958 and 1970 British birth cohort studies provide crucial life course data across generations, informing social policies and public health interventions. George reveals surprising findings such as the deteriorating health of Generation X compared to baby boomers, despite overall improvements in living standards. He argues that making longitudinal data freely available to researchers worldwide, reveals the huge value of open access for scientific advancement and policy development.
George Ploubidis is Professor of Population Health and Statistics at the UCL Social Research Institute and Director of the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Study at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. He joined the Centre for Longitudinal Studies in 2014 as the Centre’s Chief Statistician, and in 2016 became CLS’s inaugural Director of Research. Prior to joining UCL George held posts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge. His research interests relate to socioeconomic and demographic determinants of health over the life course and the mechanisms that underlie generational differences in health, well-being and mortality. His methodological work in longitudinal surveys focuses on applications for handling missing data, causal inference and measurement errors.
Some Useful Links:
Recent keynote: The future of ageing: A cross generational life course perspective
Centre for Longitudinal Studies website (for all info CLS related).
CLS Data Access page (with information on how to access CLS data).
UK Data Service (where the data can be downloaded from).
Forbes Article by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: The Battle Over Gen Z Minds, Sad, Bad or Mad?
George Ploubidis: The Rise of ‘Generational Health Drift’