Cross-National Study of Early Skills and Adult Outcomes: A Five Data Set Study of Long-Run Correlates of Age 7-10 Achievement, Attention, and Behavioral Skills

Principal Investigator: Distinguished Professor Greg Duncan

Project Collaborators

• Lars Bergman, Professor, Head of the Laboratory for Developmental Science, Head of the research program Individual Development and Adaptation, University of Stockholm,
• Kathryn Duckworth, Post Doctoral Fellow, Department of Quantitative Social Science, Institute of Education, London
• Katja Kokko, Academy Research Fellow, University of Jyväskylä, Finland,
• Molly Metzger, Graduate Student, Northwestern University
• Sharon Simonton, Research Investigator, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

Funder: Russell Sage Foundation 

Purpose of the Study: This study investigates social class differences in various skills and capacities among primary school children and the associations between these skills and adult (age 30-50) education and occupational attainment.

Study Design

This investigation is a comparative study drawing from developmental data sets that share two crucial properties:

• measurement of achievement, attention and behavioral skills on a large and diverse samples of children between ages 7 and 10; and
• measurement of adult earnings, work hours, occupational attainment, completed schooling and crime when the children had grown up and were between the ages of 27 and 50.

The data sets to be examined include: the Swedish Study of Individual Development and Adaptation, the Finnish Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development, the British Cohort Study (1970 birth cohort) and the British NCDS (1958 birth cohort), and the U.S. Baltimore Beginning School Study.

Working Hypotheses

• The greater homogeneity and more generous social welfare programs of Sweden and Finland relative to the UK and United States will lead those countries to have fewer social class differences in age 7-10 skills.
• Early skills will have, at best, modest links with adult attainments and the weakness of the links will grow as the age of the adult measurement increases. Early problem behaviors will correlate most strongly with adult criminality.
• The more egalitarian societies in Sweden and Finland relative to the UK and United States will produce stronger links between early skills and adult attainments for lower SES children.