Social inequalities in child development start early, have long term implications and are of widespread concern across Europe. The SEED project will explore the mechanisms by which inequalities affect the development of young children and the implications that they have through childhood and into work. The program of work will utilize nationally representative cohort data to achieve two principal objectives:
o To identify the mechanisms through which chaining patterns of social inequality impact on children's oral language development.
o To identify the implications that these early evolving social disparities have for patterns of performance at school age and beyond into adolescence and adulthood.
The project aims to influence policy and practice. The current sub-project will investigate whether clinical sub groups of children (primarily language impaired, hearing impaired, premature) show different outcomes in different social groups, and whether social mechanisms operate in a similar way for clinical groups as they do in the population as a whole. A more detailed description of the project is available on the
Norface. The candidate would be required to collect data, conduct analyses, collaborate with international research partners, present findings on international meetings and publish these in international scientific journals. A Master degree in Epidemiology at the
NIHES (Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences) will be part of the candidate's training. The candidate will cooperate with a large team of colleagues analysing child behaviour, genetic and brain imaging data. This research would lead toward a PhD.