A central part of the Scottish Government's strategy for the monitoring and evaluation of its policies for children, the Growing up in Scotland (GUS) study is a cohort study undertaken to fill a perceived gap in the evidence available to those concerned both with policy monitoring and evaluation of the early years of children. It is hoped that the data collected from the study will also be of use to the wider policy research and cross-sectional analysis needs of those concerned with the general range of issues affecting children and young people. The study was developed by the Scottish Centre for Social Research (ScotCen) together with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, based at the University of Edinburgh.
The survey design consisted of recruiting an initial total of 8,000 parents in 2005, comprising two sub-cohorts of children (5,000 from birth, 3,000 from age two), and then interviewing parents annually, until their child reached age five. Funding has been secured for the first eight sweeps of data collection, comprising Cohort 1 (2005-2012) and the introduction of a new birth cohort in 2011 (Cohort 2, see under SN 7432).
Cohort 1 ran from 2005-2011. Cohort 2 began in 2011.
Microdata files, available in SPSS or Stata format.
Written to CD-ROM 30.03.09.
SPSS portable files.
Users must register with the UK Data Service before receiving a copy of data files.
Edinburgh University users should contact the Data Library for access.
A version of Sweep 5, including postcodes, is available via UK Data Service Secure Access only.