Gender differences in educational outcomes were examined in a birth cohort of over 1,000 Christchurch born children studied from the point of school entry to the age of 18. This analysis suggested three major conclusions: i) Throughout the school career of this cohort males achieved less well than females. Gender differences were evident in the results of standardised testing, teacher ratings o...

BACKGROUND Childhood socio-economic position (SEP) is associated with adult smoking status. Previous studies have investigated mediation by educational attainment. The aim of this study is to examine whether childhood psychosocial factors (cognitive ability, psychosocial adjustment and parental involvement) are important in the association between childhood SEP and adult smoking status over and...

OBJECTIVES Promoting unstructured outside play is a promising vehicle to increase children's physical activity (PA). This study investigates if factors of the social environment moderate the relationship between the perceived physical environment and outside play. STUDY DESIGN 1875 parents from the KOALA Birth Cohort Study reported on their child's outside play around age five years, and 1516...

BACKGROUND Maternal labor force participation has increased dramatically over the last 40 years, yet surprisingly little is known about longitudinal patterns of maternal labor force participation in the years after a birth, or how these patterns vary by education. OBJECTIVE We document variation by maternal education in mothers' labor force participation (timing, intensity, non-standard work,...

Large-scale population-based birth cohorts, which recruit women during pregnancy or at birth and follow up their offspring through infancy and into childhood and adolescence, provide the opportunity to monitor and model early life exposures in relation to developmental characteristics and later life outcomes. However, due to confounding and other limitations, identification of causal risk facto...

Knowledge of determinants of change in diet quality is needed, but it is relatively limited to date and mostly available from cross-sectional studies. We investigated longitudinal change in diet quality and its associations with period of birth (birth cohort) and socio-demographic and lifestyle characteristics. We used dietary intake data collected by FFQ in 1992, 1996, and 2007 from a populati...

OBJECTIVES The finding that migrants to high-income countries have lower rates of morbidity and mortality than non-migrants, controlling for socioeconomic position, is often attributed to the "healthy migrant" hypothesis, which suggests that only the healthiest individuals choose to migrate. This prospective study investigates the healthy migrant hypothesis in a cohort of British emigrants usin...

Despite the abundance of medications available for human consumption, and frequent concerns about increasing medicalization or pharmaceuticalization of everyday life, there is little research investigating medicines-use in young and middle-aged populations and discussing the implications of young people using increasing numbers of medicines and becoming pharmaceutical users over time. We use da...