The Woodlawn mental health studies: tracking children and families for long-term follow-up.

Abstract

Elementary school children in a large public urban school system (Chicago) can be tracked into adolescence, together with their families, by using student numbers established by the Chicago Public Schools. This paper reports on the linkage between a psychiatric follow-up study and the data bank of the Chicago Public Schools. The authors were able to find information about the location and grade placement of 87 per cent of an urban ghetto neighborhood's first Both longitudinal and cross-sectional, epidemiologic studies are of importance for psychiatry, and for other health and education research, but to some degree each excludes the other. Longitudinal study requires long-term maintenance of contact with cases, an expensive and difficult process, forcing researchers to work with relatively few cases for long-term reassessment. Cross-sectional, epidemiologic studies, however, require enough cases to assure representativeness, making frequent contact too expensive. The problem for epidemiologic follow-up studies, therefore, is how to find large numbers of cases after a long period of time when there has not been frequent contact.In this paper we describe a method by which we have retrieved a large population of children for long-term psychiatric reassessment as part of an epidemiological follow-up after nine to ten years. We shall also describe relations between early mental health measures and retrievability, and between these measures and later grade level-one index of outcome.The development of the ecological theory of urbanization in the 1920s made possible such studies as those of Address reprint requests to Dr.

Facilitating Development Research: Suggestions for Recruiting and Re-Recruiting Children and Families

“…Across developmental sub-fields—from basic cognition (e.g., Lauer and Lourenco, 2016) and language development (e.g., Can et al, 2013) to mental (e.g., Agrawal et al, 1978) and physical health (e.g., Fein et al, 2014) to applied interventions targeting children (e.g., Campbell et al, 2012) and their families (e.g., Huston et al, 2005)—researchers are engaging in longitudinal work, re-recruiting families who participated in one study to gain a better understanding of children's developmental trajectories. Frequently, research teams do not decide to begin embarking on this work until several months or years after an original study has concluded.…”

“…Researchers have conducted such longitudinal work across a host of domains, including spatial cognition (e.g., Lauer and Lourenco, 2016), language (e.g., Can et al, 2013), literacy and mathematics achievement (e.g., Krajewski and Schneider, 2009), temperament (e.g., Schwartz et al, 2003), personality (e.g., Harris et al, 2016), memory (e.g., Forman et al, 2011), self-regulation (e.g., Ayduk et al, 2000), health and physical development (e.g., Fein et al, 2014), mental health (e.g., Agrawal et al, 1978), and media use (e.g., Hanson, 2017). Similarly, researchers who evaluate interventions also have engaged in comparable, sometimes non-prospective, longitudinal research years after the conclusion of interventions.…”

“…Leveraging relationships with partner organizations (e.g., schools, after school programs) to facilitate continued data collection (e.g., Agrawal et al, 1978; Krajewski and Schneider, 2009; Lazorick et al, 2014). In some cases, organizations such as school districts may help re-locate original study participants (Tourangeau et al, 2005) or provide researchers useful contact information (Agrawal et al, 1978).…”

“…In some cases, organizations such as school districts may help re-locate original study participants (Tourangeau et al, 2005) or provide researchers useful contact information (Agrawal et al, 1978). These sorts of researcher-organization partnerships are common in prospective longitudinal studies with children (e.g., Tourangeau et al, 2005; Language Reading Research Consortium et al, 2016).…”

“…Recruiting for cross-sectional studies with children is already quite demanding, requiring researchers to devise thoughtful sampling schemes, set up databases tracking contact with families, convince families to follow through and schedule study appointments, and confirm these appointments in a sensitive manner, all while working around families' busy schedules (Striano, 2016). In addition to these challenges, re-recruiting for longitudinal work presents the added difficulty of working with a finite pool of families who might become fatigued from participating in multiple waves of research or who might have moved or changed contact information over time (Agrawal et al, 1978; Cotter et al, 2002; Barakat-Haddad et al, 2009). …”