To Northern Ireland now, which will also play a big part in Generation New Era. The Economic and Social Research Council wanted all four nations to be included in order to paint a representative picture of childhood development across the UK, and to highlight how and where it might differ. Northern Ireland is a special case because it’s seen great deal of change off the back of the peace process and Good Friday Agreement introduced to bring an end to the troubled decades that came before as rival factions fought over reunification. We asked Orla McBride, the lead for Generation New Era in Northern Ireland, to explain…

Orla – In Northern Ireland, for example, in terms of the population size, it is the smallest UK nation. Northern Ireland has had a difficult period of time in terms of the Troubles, which has been a period of political instability, which has changed over the last number of decades since the Good Friday Belfast Agreements, in terms of the peace process. But in Northern Ireland, there are distinct cultural differences. So historically, the community has been quite segregated in terms of education, and how communities are planned, and how people live their lives. So it’s really important that those differences are understood and explored in terms of how the environment in which young children are growing up, and how their parents grew up, and their grandparents, is influencing family life and their levels of social support, how they work, and how they engage in their community today, because we know from previous studies that those types of factors surrounding the child and family can influence the outcomes for that child and family over time.

Chris – When you do the study, will a family in Northern Ireland be asked exactly the same things as a family in England? Or are there regional differences? Because if there are things that you could get at, which are a bit special to a given geography, it makes sense to tailor the enquiries and the studies to that area a bit. So, will there be differences? Or are you going for one comprehensive study everywhere?

Orla – For the first wave of Generation New Era, which we are conducting when the babies are around 9 to 10 months, the vast majority of questions that parents will be asked about their own lives and the lives of their babies at that age will be standard across the UK. So, these are typical questions around the baby’s growth and development, typical milestones, how they’re sleeping, feeding, their temperaments, how they bond with their parents, and other family members in the household. Those types of standard questions will not only be common across the UK, but also largely consistent with what has been asked in previous cohort studies, in order to allow us to determine how these indicators of growth at this young age in childhood have either changed or remained the same over different and previous generations. But as we move forward, a lot of the design of Generation New Era is influenced by public engagement with policymakers and academics in each of the UK nations. So, it maybe as we move forward in the study, there may be particular policy-relevant areas unique to Northern Ireland, for example, potentially in terms of maybe education, that we may need to drill down into slightly differently than we do in the other UK nations.

Chris – Really powerful that you’ve got that overlap with previous studies, so you can do that direct A-B comparison. How do you actually do a study like this, though? Because there’s going to be mountains of data coming in, you hope, when everyone signs up to take part, let’s cross our fingers. But what happens to that data? How does it get analysed, and who does the analysis?

Orla – You’re right. There is a lot of data generated by this type of a study, and particularly, Generation New Era is really innovative in its design. So, we will be collecting a lot more data than even previous longitudinal cohort studies, such as the Millennium Cohort Study that was conducted in 2000-2001. And as a team, we will be producing initial findings from the study when all of the data is in, and we’ve been able to analyse it. But that is just the headline or scraping the surface of the explanatory power of this social science data resource. So, the Economic and Social Research Council, who are funding the study require us to deposit data, so that’s like putting the data into a bank, where trusted and trained researchers from across the world can access this data and be able to use that to conduct research projects. So, a lot of our trainee researchers, people that are training to do PhDs or postgraduate level training, will use these types of data resources to drill down into very niche areas within the data. And we do a lot as a team, we do a lot of engagement with academic researchers and policymakers to make them aware of the availability of the data and also the richness of the data. And along with colleagues at the University College London, we do a lot of training as well with researchers as academics in order to help researchers navigate and get the maximum use out of this longitudinal data. It’s quite complex to analyse this data, and you need to have a certain skill set to be able to do it well and correctly and to ensure that the findings are accurate and are addressing specific policy research questions. But yes, it’s very exciting, and the data will be used for many decades to come.

Chris – Will you also have the potential to get biochemical data? Because obviously there’ll be a lot of social data, there’ll be other measurements and things and following the children up. But the UK Biobank has been a massive instrument for unlocking new discoveries in how clinical medicine manifests as diseases over the years. And this strikes me as the most amazing opportunity to get the fine-grained data you’re going to collect alongside some biochemicals that we could analyse in the future. So is that going to happen as well?

Orla – One of the really exciting things about Generation New Era is it’s been conducted at a time when we’re really at the cusp of a lot of methodological innovations, and the study is really rooted in administrative data possibilities. So we may be able to link participants’ data once they give us consent to do so. So that’s really exciting as we move forward. And at each wave of this study, there will be specific consultation as to what is appropriate to collect from young babies and children as they grow and develop.