Wednesday 2nd December 2009, 16.30 - 18.00, Room G.107, Alan Turing Building, University of Manchester.
Tea and coffee from 4.30 pm. The seminar will also be preceded by a short AGM
Ian Plewis (The University of Manchester)
GROWTH CURVES FOR EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENTS

Modelling repeated measures in a multilevel framework is well-established. There are, however, difficult issues especially for variables such as educational attainments that are measured in different ways over time. This paper revisits data (Feinstein, 2003) that have had an important impact on recent discussions of UK social policy. They come from the UK's 1970 birth cohort study (BCS70) and include measures of language and mathematics on up to six occasions covering the period from early childhood to age 21.

These data have some unusual features: very few cases have complete data; a bivariate growth curve approach has attractions; scaling issues that render problematic the interpretation of random effects from growth curve models.  These will be considered in the context of an underlying substantive question: the effects of social class and social mobility on the growth in cognitive and educational attainment across the first part of the life course.

The paper will address the sensitivity of the estimates of these effects to different model specifications including the form of the growth curve and a conditional model that relates the outcomes to social class as a time varying explanatory variable. The longitudinal approaches used here replicate some of Feinstein's conclusions but also extend and refine them.

Speaker Biography:
Ian Plewis joined the CCSR at The University of Manchester as Professor of Social Statistics in September 2007, having previously worked at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, University of London since 1999 where he was Professor of Longitudinal Research Methods in Education and where he now holds a visiting professorship. Before starting his academic career, he was a government statistician in Malawi. He is currently Chair of the Social Statistics Section of the Royal Statistical Society, a Fellow of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling, University of Bristol and is part of the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England Post 2010.