SPOR – Children’s development and well-being through life

SPOR – children’s development and well-being through life’ comprise a new and unique data source and the related longitudinal research. The overall aim is to enable us to answer questions such as: How do early circumstances affect children later in life? How early do the well-known differences in children’s abilities that prove important during school and later in life show?
Despite international recognition of the Danish registries, data on (i) pre-school children’s development and exposure to specific circumstances and social interventions early in life is limited. It is therefore difficult to investigate the longer-run effects of early interventions and investments in Denmark.
SPOR is a combined survey and administrative register data source that will enable Danish researchers to:
- describe and analyze children’s socio-emotional and cognitive development over time
- describe covariation of early life circumstances with children’s development and their longer-run outcomes
- analyze the causal effects of families and children’s exposure to specific interventions/treatments.
Our ambition is to follow 30,000 children from early childhood (9 mths, 2 – and 3 years, respectively) to adulthood. In time the longitudinal survey among the parents of the children will develop into a panel with unique analysis possibilities. It will enable us to gain knowledge on the children’s development (e.g. socio-emotional development and language) and on their close relations and surroundings that play an important part in the children’s lives (such as parents, their home, and daycare). Knowledge that we are unable to get from registers. By combining SPOR survey data with register data from Statistic Denmark our research team will be able to investigate: (A) general patterns in child development, (B) the effects of e.g. social interventions on early and later child development and (C) under which circumstances.