In this Insights Report, Professor Jo Boyden, former Young Lives Director, discusses the challenges of successful leadership and management of the complex longitudinal Young Lives study. Jo reflects on lessons learnt over the last two decades, particularly in relation to delivering research to policy impact in diverse country contexts and during periods of unprecedented change, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. Jo is in conversation with Kath Ford, an international development policy consultant and former Young Lives Programme Manager.

The authors provide an update on the Cohort Profile of the Young Lives Study, in an article published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2021.

Key messages from the article are: 

• Young Lives is a longitudinal study tracking two cohorts of children in four low-and-middle-income countries [Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam].

• The survey started in 2002 and three rounds were completed by 2009. Two further rounds took place in 2013 (round 4) and 2016 (round 5). Most recently the round planned for 2020 was conducted by telephone.

This summary of the ‘Ethics Learning from Young Lives: 20 Years On’ report outlines some of the main ethics challenges during the operationalisation of Young Lives, an ongoing longitudinal, mixed-methods, collaborative study of childhood poverty in four countries that began in 2001.

Many complex ethics questions arise in the conduct of longitudinal research in low- and - middle income countries (LMICs), particularly in studies that involve children and other potentially vulnerable social groups over long periods of time.  Young Lives strives to adhere to agreed ethical standards which emphasise principles of justice, respect and informed consent, and of maximising benefits while avoiding doing harm to the people in our study.  Whist there is a well-developed ethics literature on children and youth in social research, less is published on the le

In this IFS Working Paper, the authors study the relationship between child work and cognitive development in four Low and Middle Income Countries. They address a key weakness in the literature by including children’s full time-use vector in the analysis, which leads to different findings from previous studies which do not distinguish between alternative counter-factual activities. They find child work is only detrimental if it crowds out school/study time rather than leisure.