UK Data Service series record for:
The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), which began in 2000, is conducted by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS). It aims to chart the conditions of social, economic and health advantages and disadvantages facing children born at the start of the 21st century The study has been tracking the 'Millennium children' through their early childhood years and plans to follow them into adulthood. It also provides a basis for comparing patterns of development with the preceding cohort studies (the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 Birth Cohort Study (BCS70).
GN 33359 | Millennium Cohort Study, 2001-
GN 33384 | Millennium Cohort Study: Special Licence Access
GN 33445 | Millennium Cohort Study, 2001- : Secure Access
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The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is the UK's newest longitudinal birth cohort study and follows the lives of a sample of babies born between 1 September 2000 and 31 August 2001 in England and Wales, and between 22 November 2000 and 11 January 2002 in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The main objectives of the survey are:
When the cohort members young children they were interviewed roughly every two years. At present, interviews take place roughly every three years. For the first survey (fieldwork 2001-2003) interviews were carried out both with mothers and (where resident) fathers or father figures of nearly 19,000 babies at nine months of age. The first follow-up survey was conducted between late 2003 and mid 2005. MCS3 was completed in early 2007. MCS4 interviewed children when they were aged 7 and fieldwork finished in 2008. In 2012 MCS5 collected interviews with children at age 11. In 2015 MCS6 collected surveyed children when they were aged around 14. The next survey of cohort members is planned for 2018 when they are aged 17.
The data are available in SPSS, Stata, SAS and ASCII tab-delimited formats.
Details of publications are given in the publications section of the Millennium Cohort Study website.
The End User Licence version of the Millennium Cohort Study includes Government Office Region as the standard geographic identifier. Owing to the increased confidentiality risk associated with more precise spatial identifiers, more detailed variables are available only under Secure Access. Please see the Data Access section above for more details.
Subsets and adaptations of the following measures have been used in the MCS:
In addition, parents' employment and socio-economic classification were measured using SOC2000 and NS-SEC.
Variable lists and PDF user guides (including questionnaires) are freely available via Millennium Cohort Study.
Files are named according to the sweep of the data and the date that file was created. For example, 'mcs2_data_march_2006' is the file for the second sweep, created in March 2006.
Two longitudinal files are common to both sweeps: 'mcs_longitudinal_family_level_information' and 'mcs_longitudinal_household_grid'.
For the majority of variables, the first two letters identify the sweep and questionnaire to which the variable relates. Most variables prefixed with A refer to sweep 1 and variables prefixed with B refer to sweep 2. Generally, the second letter in the variable name relates to the questionnaire. For example: AM*** signifies that the variable is sweep 1, main questionnaire. BP*** would relate to sweep 2, partner questionnaire. *X***, *H*** and *A*** refer to data collected from proxy responses, household questions and administrative questions respectively.
The exceptions to this protocol are generally derived variables.
See the CLS web page: MCS6 2015.