An exploration of childhood antecedents of female adult malaise in two British birth cohorts: combining Bayesian model averaging and recursive partitioning

John Hobcraft and Wendy Sigle-Rushton

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We use information from two prospective British birth cohort studies to explore the antecedents of adult malaise, an indicator of incipient depression. These studies include a wealth of information on childhood circumstances, behaviour, test scores and family background, measured several times during childhood. We are concerned both with incorporating model uncertainty and using a person-centred approach. We explore associations in both cohorts using two separate approaches: Bayesian model averaging (BMA) and recursive trees. The first approach permits us to assess model uncertainty, necessary because many childhood antecedents are highly correlated. BMA also aims to produce more robust results for extrapolation to other data sets through averaging over the range of plausible models. The second approach is concerned with partitioning the sample, through a series of binary splits, into groups of people who are as alike as possible. One advantage is that the approach is person-centred in that it retains real groups of respondents. We compare and contrast the insights obtained from the two approaches and use the results from each to inform the other and thus refine our understanding further. Moreover, we explore the claimed added robustness for extrapolation by using a split-sample for the 1970 cohort. The consistency of results across methods and cohorts is discussed throughout.

Keywords: well-being; cohort; Bayesian Model Averaging; recursive trees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C14 I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2005-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6269/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:6269

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().