ABSTRACT
In 1946 the mothers of all babies born during the first week of March were contacted eight weeks after delivery by Dr. Douglas and his colleagues in England, Wales, and Scotland. Interviews were successfully completed with 90 percent of them. Of these 13,687 mothers, 7,287 completed a questionnaire dealing mainly with the availability of maternity services and the use they had made of them, and 6,400 replied to questions on medical expenditures and other costs associated with the birth of their babies. A report on these findings was published in 1948. 1
Originally, it was not intended that this should be the first stage of a long-term follow-up series of inquiries, but since the investigators found that they were in possession of a fully representative sample of children from all types of homes and all parts of Britain it was decided to follow them through for at least part of their future. A sample of 5,362 children was selected from the original sample for further research, and by 1948 the sample had dwindled to 5,005 and by 1950 to 4,921. But there was valuable information on what had by now happened to them during the first few years of life, and in 1958 a further 179 report was published giving details of their experiences—accidents, illness, toilet training, parental care, etc.—as seen against the background of stable or broken homelife in the different social classes. 2
By the summer of 1957, 623 of the original 5,362 children had died or moved abroad. There were left in England and Wales 4,195 children and 544 in Scotland. It was decided to study the educational experiences of only the English and Welsh children. Full information was available for 3,418 of these and partial information for 657, leaving 120 for whom there was no information. In spite of these losses the evidence showed that for most inquiry purposes the sample was still reasonably representative of the general population. Special school records had been kept of them and medical reports were available. At eight years and three months they were given a picture intelligence test and sentence completion, reading, and vocabulary tests. In England, primary education is completed at the end of the academic year in which a child reaches his eleventh birthday. All children sit the so-called 11 + examinations for entrance to secondary school during the year, and on the basis of the standard attained are awarded places in the secondary grammar, the secondary technical, and the secondary modern schools. The children included in Dr. Douglas’s survey were also tested immediately before they sat their 11 + examinations. The reading and vocabulary tests were repeated, and they completed a mixed verbal and nonverbal intelligence test and an arithmetic test.
Throughout the period from 1946, health visitors and school nurses had visited the homes of the children on an average of once a year. In addition to recording accidents, hospital admissions, and absences from school of more than a week’s duration, these visits provided information about the educational aspirations which parents had for their children and about the careers they had in mind for them. This information provided the background to the analysis made in the selection from the report published here. Thus although the emphasis is on the child at 11 +, the classification of parents in 180 terms of the standards of care which they provided and the kind of encouragement which they gave their children, was made by reference to data collected over a period of eleven years; and in this sense it may be said to represent long-standing differences.
It should be understood that attitude surveys as normally understood were not employed in the three longitudinal studies by Douglas. As far as possible, the researchers relied upon objective measures, tests of the children, and easily recorded data on their circumstances, accidents, illness, size of the family, father’s occupation, and so on. Subjective information was obtained, of course, but from the health visitors and the teachers rather than directly from the parents. This reduces the comparability which the work might otherwise have had with other surveys of the effect of parental encouragement in children’s educational performance in, say, America. But because of its continuity through eleven years of the children’s lives, J. W. B. Douglas’s work on behalf of the Population Investigation Committee of the London School of Economics, the Society of Medical Officers of Health, and the Institute of Child Health, University of London will remain a most valuable contribution to the sociology of education for a long time to come.
