WP2: Abstract
Measuring Child Poverty and Health A New International Study
The health community is well versed in the advantages of longitudinal studies, which produce time series data rather than snapshot cross-sectional studies. Seeking the holy grail of ‘causality’ rather than mere ‘associations’, prospective cohort studies move us one step forward (see the classic text on judgement of cause–effect relationships in Hennekens and Burling (1987)). However, in health research in developing countries there are few cohort studies because they are very expensive, technically challenging, and because there is limited capacity for implementing them in resource constrained environments. Two events have generated sufficient support for a major new cohort study. Firstly, various governments, including the UK, agreed to work towards international development targets (IDTs) which included the aim to halve the proportion of people living in extreme income poverty by 2015. The commitment to targets requires some sort of baseline and better understanding of how individuals experience poverty dynamically, e.g. moving in and out of poverty. Secondly, the millennium generated general interest in children born in the year 2000 and curiosity as to how they will develop in the new century. In 2001 a major new prospective cohort study was launched which will follow up children born into poverty (plus a small number of non-poor for comparative purposes) in Ethiopia, Vietnam, Peru, and the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. Two thousand poor children in each country will be re-visited every three years until they are 15. Entitled ‘Young Lives: an international study of childhood poverty’, the project (www.younglives.org.uk) will strengthen research capacity in the selected developing countries and aims to be replicable in other countries interested in implementing a child cohort study.