Discover peer-reviewed journal articles and reports that use ADR UK-funded flagship datasets. This collection is being expanded over time.
Displaying results 1 to 10 out of 28
Increasing access to children’s social care data presents enormous potential for research and policy evaluation, with opportunities increased where data can be anonymously linked to other sources of information, such as health and education data. The purpose of this scoping review was to provide an overview of all UK data linkage studies that have used routinely collected individual-level children’s social care administrative data. Six research databases were searched and twenty-five studies were identified as meeting the inclusion criteria, with the majority (n = 18) based on English data. Complexities and the time-consuming nature of these studies are highlighted, as are issues with missing data and inconsistencies in recording information across local authorities, impacting on the linkage process. Increased access to such data, and improvements to data capture, could improve the utility of these valuable administrative data assets in the social care sector.
Dataset used: Looked After Children Dataset - Wales
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This study examines health service indicators of stress-related presentations (relating to pain, mental illness, psychosomatic symptoms and self-harm) in adolescents of secondary school age, using Hospital Episode Statistics data for England. We examined weekly time series data for three academic years spanning the time before (2018–2019) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2020 and 2020–2021), including the first lockdown when schools were closed to the majority of pupils. For all secondary school children, weekly stress presentations dropped following school closures. However, patterns of elevated stress during school terms re-established after reopening, with girls aged 11–15 showing an overall increase compared with pre-pandemic rates.
Dataset used: Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data - England
We first review research about income and earnings volatility and second provide new UK evidence about the latter using high-quality administrative record data. The USA stands out as a high-volatility country relative to the UK and other high-income countries, but volatility levels have remained constant in these countries recently. Almost all research has considered volatility from an annual perspective whereas we provide new evidence about month-to-month earnings volatility. There is a distinct within-year seasonal pattern to volatility, and volatility is highest for the top and bottom tenths of earners. High earnings volatility among top earners and its seasonality reflect pay bonus patterns whereas, for low earners, the instability of hours including zero-hours contracts likely plays important roles. Our findings have relevance to the design of cash transfer support in the UK because the monthly reference periods it uses do not align with many earners' pay periods.
Dataset used: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings linked to PAYE and Self-Assessment data – England, Scotland and Wales
We use a large and novel administrative dataset to investigate returns to different university ‘degrees’ (subject-institution combinations) in the United Kingdom. Conditioning on a rich set of background characteristics, we find substantial variation in returns across degrees with similar selectivity levels, suggesting students’ degree choices matter a lot for later-life earnings. Returns increase with university selectivity much more at the top of the selectivity distribution than further down, and much more for some subjects than others. Returns are poorly correlated with observable degree characteristics other than selectivity, which could have important implications for student choices and the incentives of universities.
Dataset used: Longitudinal Education Outcomes - England
This aimed to assess the feasibility of using linked education and offending data (from the National Pupil Database, Department for Education and the Police National Computer, Ministry of Justice) to identify matched control groups to evaluate violence prevention interventions.
Dataset used: Ministry of Justice & Department for Education linked dataset - England
Evidence for or against a causal effect of school exclusion on offending is inhibited by random allocation not being available on ethical grounds. To advance understanding of the connection between school exclusion and offending—specifically, serious violent offending—we emulate a randomized controlled trial using a target trial framework and a linkage of national education and justice data. Across more than 20,000 matched pairs of excluded and not excluded children exclusion was associated with at least a doubling of risk for perpetrating serious violence (hazard ratio 2.05, 95% CI: 1.83, 2.29) and homicide/near-miss homicide (2.36, 95% CI: 1.04, 5.36) within 12 months of target trial entry. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and policy in education and criminal justice as well as discussing the extent to which the observed relationships can be considered causal.
We aimed to quantify differences in number and timing of first primary cleft lip and palate (CLP) repair procedures during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021; 2020/2021) compared with the preceding year (1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020; 2019/2021).
This study investigated the impact of change in community alcohol availability on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harms to health, assessing the effect of population migration and small-area deprivation.
Dataset used: Welsh Environment Dataset
The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is based on an annual 1% sample of employee jobs and provides many of the UK's official earnings statistics. These statistics are produced using official weights designed to make the achieved sample in each year representative of the population of employee jobs in Britain by gender, age, occupation and region. However, we show that jobs in small, young, private-sector organisations remain significantly under-represented after applying these weights. To address this issue, we develop new weights and demonstrate their importance through policy-relevant examples. Our new estimates suggest that the bite of the National Living Wage is greater than previously reported, and the gender pay gap is wider. We conclude that a new official review of the methodology for ASHE is merited to improve the accuracy and reliability of data informing earnings analysis and research in the United Kingdom.
Dataset used: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings linked to 2011 Census - England and Wales
It is well-known that ethnic minority and migrant workers have lower average pay than the White UK-born workforce. However, we know much less about how these gaps vary over the life-cycle because of data limitations. We use new data that combine a 1999–2018 panel from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) with individual characteristics from the 2011 Census in England and Wales. We investigate pay gaps on labour market entry and differences in pay growth. We find that differences in entry pay gaps are more important than differences in pay growth. The entry pay gaps are large, though vary across groups. The pay penalties on labour market entry can, to a considerable degree, be explained by over-representation in lower-paying firms and, within firms, in lower-paying occupations. For most groups, the pay gaps at entry seem to be largely preserved over the life-cycle, neither narrowing nor widening. For migrants, we find that the extra pay penalty is concentrated almost exclusively in those who arrived in the UK at later ages.
