Introduction: existing sources of British youth data

The inherently dynamic nature of the ‘youth phase’ implies that longitudinal data is needed to study it. A number of important sources of longitudinal data exist in Britain that can be used to study young people. The most notable of these resources are the birth cohort studies. The National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the British Cohort Study (BCS70) are birth cohorts of children born in 1946, 1958 and 1970 respectively. The logic behind these surveys was to provide broadly comparable nationally representative birth cohorts for every generation after the Second World War. (However, it is debatable as to whether 12 years is the appropriate age gap between generations.) The birth cohort that should have commenced in 1982 never took place. These three birth cohort studies initially had a medical/health orientation (for example, perinatal mortality, neonatal morbidity and child development), but as they progressed they included more data appropriate to social science inquiry.

The NCDS and the BCS70 are more widely known than the NSHD within the British social science community. These three datasets suffer the usual problems associated with birth cohort studies. I suggest that they also suffer the major limitation that their data is of decreasing relevance to contemporary youth research, although they are still being analysed (see Bynner, 2002).

The light at the end of the tunnel is the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). This new study will fill the gap of 30 years in the British birth cohort portfolio (see Smith and Joshi, 2002). It is proposed that the MCS will maintain the essential features of the earlier birth cohort studies. However, it has a different design and sampling strategy, so I remain sceptical about how easily the MCS data could be used in research projects designed to make comparisons with data from the earlier birth cohorts.

The Scottish Young People's Survey (SYPS) and the Youth Cohort Study (YCS) of England and Wales both began in the 1980s. It is sometimes suggested that they help to fill the gap left by the missing 1980s birth cohort study.