Epidemiological Methods in Life Course Research

Andrew Pickles is a methodologist and statistician with a special interest in developmental psychopathology. His work spans genetics to long-term cohort and follow-up studies. Currently at the University of Manchester, he was previously senior statistician at the MRC Child Psychiatry Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry, London.Barbara Maughan's research focuses on psychosocial risks for psychiatric disorders in childhood, and on continuities and discontinuities between disorder in childhood and in adult life.Michael Wadsworth has directed and worked on the first British national birth control cohort study (the 1946 cohort), developing it as a resource of data on health throughout life and health change with age.

• 1. Introduction: development and progression of life course ideas in epidemiology ; 2. Measurement and design for life course studies of individual differences and development ; 3. Measurement and design for life course studies of the social environment and its impact on health ; 4. Designs for large life course studies of genetic effects ; 5. Human development, life course, intervention and health ; 6. The life course plot in life course analysis ; 7. Methods for handling missing data ; 8. An overview of models and methods for life course analysis ; 9. An overview of methods for studying events and their timing

Persons interested in life-course epidemiology wtih benefit greatly from reading this book. Throughout, the authors appropriately emphasize the strong connections betweent eh current construct of life-course epidemiology and vigorous research traditions in epidemiology, biology, psychology and the social sciences. The interdisciplinary quality of the book is especially welcome...in conjunction wtih the othe two volumes in this Oxford series, this book is of interest to both experienced epidemiologist and those in training programs, in addition to life-course researchers in related fields.