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Growing Up in Scotland: Cohort 1, Sweep 8 Physical Activity Data, 2015-2016

Johnstone, A. and Mccrorie, P. (2023) Growing Up in Scotland: Cohort 1, Sweep 8 Physical Activity Data, 2015-2016. [Data Collection]

Datacite DOI: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-9120-1

Collection description

The Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) study is a large-scale longitudinal social survey which follows the lives of several groups of Scottish children from infancy through childhood and adolescence, and aims to provide important new information on children and their families in Scotland. The study forms a central part of the Scottish Government's strategy for the long-term monitoring and evaluation of its policies for children, with a specific focus on the early years. Unlike other similar cohort studies, this survey has a specifically Scottish focus. A key objective of GUS is to address a significant gap in the evidence base for early years policy monitoring and evaluation. The study seeks both to describe the characteristics, circumstances and experiences of children in their early years (and their parents) in Scotland and, through its longitudinal design, to generate a better understanding of how children's start in life can shape their longer term prospects and development.

Since 2005, study design and data collection have been undertaken by ScotCen Social Research with collaborations with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, based at the University of Edinburgh and the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit over certain periods of the project. The survey design consisted of recruiting an initial total of 8,000 parents in 2005, comprising two cohorts of children (5,000 from birth, 3,000 from age two years and ten months), and then interviewing parents annually until their child reached age five years ten months. Further fieldwork was undertaken with the birth cohort when the children were around eight, ten, twelve and fourteen years old. A boost sample of 500 children from predominantly high deprivation areas was added to the cohort as part of the age 12 fieldwork.

Data is collected via an in-home, face-to-face interview with self-complete sections. Fieldwork for sweep 10 was disrupted due to the COVID pandemic. As a result, the final portion of the data was collected via web and telephone questionnaires.

Further information about the survey may be found on the Growing Up in Scotland website.

SN 9120 - Growing Up in Scotland: Cohort 1, Sweep 8 Physical Activity Data, 2015-2016
The Studying Physical Activity in Children's Environments across Scotland (SPACES) project aimed to investigate the ways in which the built, natural and social environment influences children's physical activity. The project employed an observational, cross-sectional design that sub-sampled from Birth Cohort 1 (BC1) of the GUS during the GUS Sweep 8 fieldwork. Children sub-sampled from GUS were invited to provide objectively measured physical activity data by wearing an accelerometer for eight days.

This dataset provides a range of summary physical activity variables from this project. A total of 775 children provided valid data. As a sub sample of GUS BC1, the summary level physical activity data can be linked, where appropriate, to other GUS BC1 datasets held on UKDS at the individual level. The physical activity data were collected between May 2015 and May 2016 by the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit (SPHSU), University of Glasgow.

MAIN TOPICS
To support a range of analytical projects, a series of summary variables have been derived and included in the dataset. These include minutes spent in different categories of physical activity and variables indicating whether the child met the recommended Scottish Government guidelines of 60 minutes of physical activity each day (calculated in two forms: an average of 60 minutes per day overall valid days; a stricter measure of actual 60 minutes per day on each valid day).

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