Systematic review of birth cohort studies in South East Asia and Eastern Mediterranean regions

Few longitudinal studies of children have taken place in the developing world, despite child mortality being concentrated there. This review summarises the methodologies and main outcomes of longitudinal studies of pre-school children (0 to 59 months) in the World Health Organization’s South East Asia (SEA) and Eastern Mediterranean (EM) Regions

Integrating clinical data from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies

Clinical trials are typically conducted over a population in order to illuminate certain characteristics of a health issue or disease process. These cross-sectional studies provide a snapshot of these disease processes over a large population but do not allow us to model the temporal nature of disease. Longitudinal studies on the other hand, are used to explore how these processes develop over time but can be expensive and time-consuming, and only cover a relatively small window within the disease process. This paper explores a technique for integrating cross-sectional and longitudinal studies to build models of disease progression

Handling Attrition in Longitudinal Studies: The Case for Refreshment Samples

Panel studies typically suffer from attrition, which reduces sample size and can result in biased inferences. It is impossible to know whether or not the attrition causes bias from the observed panel data alone. Refreshment samples - new, randomly sampled respondents given the questionnaire at the same time as a subsequent wave of the panel - offer information that can be used to diagnose and adjust for bias due to attrition. We review and bolster the case for the use of refreshment samples in panel studies. We include examples of both a fully Bayesian approach for analyzing the concatenated panel and refreshment data, and a multiple imputation approach for analyzing only the original panel. For the latter, we document a positive bias in the usual multiple imputation variance estimator. We present models appropriate for three waves and two refreshment samples, including nonterminal attrition. We illustrate the three-wave analysis using the 2007-2008 Associated Press-Yahoo! News Election Poll.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-STS414 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Compensating for Missing Data from Longitudinal Studies Using WinBUGS

Missing data is a common problem in survey based research. There are many packages that compensate for missing data but few can easily compensate for missing longitudinal data. WinBUGS compensates for missing data using multiple imputation, and is able to incorporate longitudinal structure using random effects. We demonstrate the superiority of longitudinal imputation over cross-sectional imputation using WinBUGS. We use example data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health. We give a SAS macro that uses WinBUGS to analyze longitudinal models with missing covariate date, and demonstrate its use in a longitudinal study of terminal cancer patients and their carers.

Children and young people living through a serious family illness: structural, interpersonal and personal perspectives

This study explores the experiences of children and young people in Britain living through a serious family illness. The study considers the interplay between social structures, social relationships and individual agency. We draw on data from the Millennium Cohort Study to estimate the number of children and young people affected nationally and on seven in-depth interviews to understand young people’s experiences and the effects on their daily lives. Living through a serious family illness impacts on young people’s educational achievements, mental health and social relationships over long periods. Policy and service responses are suggested

Millennium Cohort Study Second Survey: A User's Guide to Initial Findings

This report presents some of the main initial findings of the Second Survey of the Millennium Cohort Study conducted by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, which is based at the Institute of Education, University of London. It is intended to provide an introduction to potential users of the survey and to stimulate further in-depth and longitudinal analysis