Social and economic transitions and their effect on young people’s health and social wellbeing.

The importance of the early years for ensuring health, prosperity and wellbeing throughout the life course now informs the economic and social planning of Governments across the UK and internationally, informing, for example, the move towards publically funding pre-school education. Gaining a better understanding of the effect that the social environment can have on children and young people is important for identifying ways to mitigate harmful influences.  Low familial Socioeconomic Status (SES) has been found to have a negative effect on child health but studies have shown that this effect diminishes over time especially where SES increases in adulthood.

Changing social and economic circumstance in childhood, such as marital breakdown, can have an effect on the physical and mental health of young people. With the global recession of 2009 many individuals will have remained in low socio-economic positions or even descended from higher to lower socio-economic positions over the last decade.  Using two waves of NILS data from the 2001 and 2011 censuses, this project will assess how individual, household and area factors can influence educational, social and health outcomes for young people.  This gives us a unique opportunity to explore simultaneously the relative influence on health, education and employment of the familial and socioeconomic circumstances of the sample individuals, and their area of residence, at two time points over a ten year period.

Outputs:

Maguire, A., McCann, M., & Moriarty, J. (2014) ‘The effect of social & economic transition on children & young people‘ – presented at the NI Census launch event, 5th June 2014, NISRA. [069]

Mark McCann ‘Health Inequalities, economic transitions and multimorbidity in Northern Ireland’ Presented at CALLS Hub conference, St Andrews. March 2018