PI and Co-applicant: Clare Blackburn, Janet Read, Nick Spencer
Funder: ESRC
(2010-2012)

 

This project aims to generate robust data on the association between childhood limiting long-term illness and disability with socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity, gender, lone parenthood and parental disability, identifying predictors, trends and causal direction. Its objectives are to:

1. To undertake secondary analysis of data from the Samples of Anonymised Records for the 1991 and 2001 UK population censuses in order to:

• identify the trends in childhood disability by gender, age, region, ethnicity, lone parenthood and socio-economic position;
• examine whether there is an association between childhood disability and ethnicity after adjustment for social disadvantage;
• explore the association between childhood disability and lone parenthood after adjustment for social disadvantage;
• identify the extent to which any regional differences in childhood disability can be explained by social disadvantage;
• examine whether disabled children are more likely than other children to live with disabled parents.

2. To undertake secondary analysis of the ONS Longitudinal Study to:

• examine whether children with limiting long-term illness/disability are more likely than other children to live with adults with limiting long-term illness/disability;
• explore the extent to which parental limiting long-term illness/disability precedes or follows caring for a child with limiting long-term illness/disability;
• examine whether social disadvantage predisposes children to limiting long-term illness/disability, and if so, to what extent;
• identify how much of the social disadvantage experienced by households with children with limiting long-term illness/disability precedes the onset of the child's limiting long-term illness/disability, and how much follows on from it.

 
3. To carry out a systematic review of the published literature on the association between disability in childhood and social disadvantage in high income countries in order to bring together the evidence on the relationship and to progress theory on the nature of that relationship/association.

For further information contact:

Dr Clare Blackburn c.m.blackburn@warwick.ac.uk or Tel 024 7652 4132