A longitudinal lifecourse analysis assessing the implication of educational attainment and gender on mental health and well being by the time a person

Lead Research Organisation: University of Southampton
Department Name: School of Social Sciences

Abstract

Mental health is a serious health problem facing society and health systems within the UK. It is an important health outcome in its own right but also is a known risk factor for poor physical health and well being including heart disease, stroke, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and Type II Diabetes. However, mental wellbeing remains less researched and understood than physical health problems. This research looks at how a person's early life chances can affect their mental health between the ages of 42 and 46 (mid-life) specifically looking at differences in mental health depending on a person's gender and level of education. The work aims to elucidate the pathways through which educational attainment can affect mental wellbeing. It will look at mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety and will draw from a range of different disciplines including literature from demography, geography, sociology, education, health and psychology. This research will analyse data from the British Cohort Study conducted in 2012 and the sweep currently being conducted (2016/2017). In particular it will look at the data based on a cognitive assessment, a 45-minute interview and analyse if a person's educational attainment as well as a person's gender has any implication on the level and type of mental health issues they might develop. This research is currently highly topical because both the Department for Work and Pensions and NHS have ambitions to reduce inequalities in mental health across the lifecourse.

Publications

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Description This award has funded research into the first paper of the PhD. The first paper of the PhD investigated the early life mediators behind the intergenerational transmission of partnership dissolution. The paper found that parental separation is associated to the number of partnership dissolutions a child will experience in adulthood for both men and women. Significantly the paper used for mediation analyses to investigate the role variables in childhood had in underpinning this addiction.The mediators that contributed the most to explaining the effect of parental separation were child cognition and child behaviour for men, and maternal gender role attitudes and maternal mental wellbeing for women. Childhood socioeconomic status was a strong mediator for both genders. These mediators indicate that for men, the intergenerational transmission of partnership dissolution links to the ideas of resource depletion and impaired interpersonal skills theories. For women, the mediators relate to the ideas of resource depletion and socialisation theories. This paper and findings have been presented at two conferences the British Society for Population Studies Conference (2019) and the Divorce conference (2019). The results will also be presented at the BCS70 conference (2020) and European Population Conference (2020) and I hope the research should bepublish in a journal this year (2020).
Exploitation Route we still make a number of observations and recommendations based on the findings of this study. Firstly, and most significantly our results indicate that the circumstances correlated to an increase in the number of coresidential dissolution in adulthood may occur earlier in the life course than previously reported. Policy should therefore continue to use prospective life course data to analyse and explore further circumstances in the early life course that may be associated to coresidential dissolution in adulthood. Secondly, policy needs to target the potential detrimental impact of a reduction in resources following parental separation. Our research suggests that for both genders, even after controlling for parental SES at the time of the cohort members birth, lower family SES at age 10 was the key mediator out of the seven early life mediators reviewed for predicting coresidential dissolution. For men, we observed that for those who had experienced parental separation the behavioural and cognitive developments at age 10 were important for prediction coresidential dissolutions. Therefore, policy may want to look at targeting the behaviour and cognition of a child in the early life course, an opportunity to address these issues may be through schools and education. We also observe that for women, the social environment appears to be important for prediction coresidential dissolution in adulthood. In particular the potential transmission of changing gender role attitudes following parental separation. Finally, we must restate that because for the most part partnership dissolution is a choice, we should not treat it in an overly deterministic manner. As such, rather than policy looking to prevent partnership dissolution it would be more beneficial to target the potential detrimental impacts of partnership dissolutions.
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