Grant: Operating Grant - Secondary Analysis of Databases

Multiple, comprehensive social and health related variables will be used to gain an understanding of what is important (and at which point in the child's early years) in predicting health outcomes. We will focus on important health conditions which children face in their early years: asthma, injuries, psychosocial conditions (mental health), developmental disabilities, and primary infections. The risk factors include: family income, parental educational achievement, mother's age at first birth, family structure, family dysfunction, residential mobility, and parental health (physical and mental illness). Major hypotheses to be investigated include: 1. The strongest differences in outcomes will be found for those children living in households with the lowest incomes and for those with substantial family problems; 2. The influence of social factors will be higher for injuries and for mental health than for other conditions; 3. Risk factors will be cumulative but the importance of particular factors will vary according to the condition studied; 4. Our detailed measures will allow stronger prediction than research relying on primary data collection; 5. The addition of the individual predictors (for household income and parental educational achievement) will not markedly increase the amount of variance explained (given available neighbourhood information).