Childhood adversities have been linked to psychosocial outcomes, but it remains uncertain whether subtypes of adversity exert different effects on outcomes. Research is also needed to explore the dynamic interplay between adversity and psychosocial outcomes from childhood to mid-adolescence. This study aimed to investigate these relationships and their role in shaping adolescent wellbeing. Data were extracted from three timepoints of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey when participants (n = 646) were aged 10–15. Cross-lagged panel models were used to explore the relationship between cumulative adversities, and separately non-household (i.e., bullying victimization and adverse neighborhood) and household (i.e., sibling victimization, quarrelsome relationship with parents, financial struggles, and maternal psychological distress) adversities, and psychosocial outcomes (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problems, delinquency, and life satisfaction). Our results revealed that heightened cumulative adversity predicted psychosocial outcomes from childhood to mid-adolescence. Increased levels of household adversity predicted psychosocial outcomes throughout early to mid-adolescence, while non-household adversity only predicted psychosocial outcomes in early adolescence. Furthermore, worse psychosocial outcomes predicted higher levels of adversities during adolescence, highlighting bidirectionality between adversity and psychosocial outcomes. These findings underscore the varying impacts of adversity subtypes and the mutually reinforcing effects of adversities and psychosocial functioning from childhood to mid-adolescence.

Negative symptoms remain poorly understood and treated despite their huge impact on patients’ lives and clinical outcomes. This is partly because of ongoing debates about the clinical constructs underlying negative symptoms. A longitudinal analysis of the structure of negative symptoms presented in BJPsych Open reports striking temporal stability of symptom structure, which behaves as a few independent domains. This further underscores the need to address specific symptom domains when considering interventions or pathophysiology studies.

In studies that contain repeated measures of variables, longitudinal analysis accounting for time-varying covariates is one of the options. We aimed to explore longitudinal association between diet quality (DQ) and non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Participants from the 1973–1978 cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH) were included, if they; responded to survey 3 (S3, 2003, aged 25–30 years) and at least one survey between survey 4 (S4, 2006) and survey 8 (S8, 2018), were free of NCDs at or before S3, and provided dietary data at S3 or S5. Outcomes were coronary heart disease (CHD), hypertension (HT), asthma, cancer (except skin cancer), diabetes mellitus (DM), depression and/or anxiety, and multimorbidity (MM). Longitudinal modelling using generalised estimation equation (GEE) approach with time-invariant (S4), time-varying (S4–S8) and lagged (S3–S7) covariates were performed. The mean (± standard deviation) of Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 (AHEI-2010) of participants (n = 8022) was 51·6 ± 11·0 (range: 19–91). Compared to women with the lowest DQ (AHEI-2010 quintile 1), those in quintile 5 had reduced odds of NCDs in time-invariant model (asthma: OR (95 % CI): 0·77 (0·62–0·96), time-varying model (HT: 0·71 (0·50–0·99); asthma: 0·62 (0·51–0·76); and MM: 0·75 (0·58–0·97) and lagged model (HT: 0·67 (0·49–0·91); and asthma: 0·70 (0·57–0·85). Temporal associations between diet and some NCDs were more prominent in lagged GEE analyses. Evidence of diet as NCD prevention in women aged 25–45 years is evolving, and more studies that consider different longitudinal analyses are needed.

Existing research on housing cost burden focuses on its evolution over time. Few empirical studies, meanwhile, investigate changes in housing cost burden as a function of age. Literature is also scarce on how people's housing cost burden is affected by the act of retiring. In order to fill this research gap, we examine how the burden of housing costs tends to change after retirement and how the impact of retirement on housing cost burden differs for tenants as compared to homeowners. Taking advantage of the longitudinal data provided by the German Socio-Economic Panel (1993–2019), we estimate fixed effects regressions and model impact functions to estimate how people's housing cost burdens change after they retire. In addition, we interact the retirement event with tenure status. Our results show that retirement is associated with an increase in housing cost burden and that this association is stronger among tenants than among homeowners. We contribute to the literature on housing cost burden by taking a longitudinal perspective and showing that critical life events such as retirement do have an impact on the financial pressures exerted on households by housing costs and can even exacerbate the existing inequality in terms of housing cost burden between tenants and homeowners. We also demonstrate the importance for policy makers and future research of identifying social groups that may be particularly prone to financial overburden as a result of elevated housing costs in old age in order to implement policies that avoid such overburden and prevent the increase in social inequality after retirement.

The aim of our study was to examine the longitudinal associations between two forms of second language (L2) knowledge (i.e., explicit and implicit knowledge) and the activity types that facilitate different processing mechanisms (i.e., form- and meaning-focused processing). L2 English speakers completed two tests of explicit knowledge (untimed written grammaticality judgment test and metalinguistic knowledge test) and three tests of implicit knowledge (timed written grammaticality judgment test, oral production, and elicited imitation) at the beginning and the end of a semester of university-level study. To track engagement in the activity types, participants completed self-reported language exposure logs across five days throughout the semester. The results from an autoregressive cross-lag analysis suggest L2 explicit and implicit knowledge influenced each other reciprocally over time. Neither activity type predicted knowledge development. We conclude that language acquisition is a developmental process typified by a dynamic, synergistic interface between explicit and implicit knowledge.

A growing body of research indicates that forecasting skill is a unique and stable trait: forecasters with a track record of high accuracy tend to maintain this record. But how does one identify skilled forecasters effectively? We address this question using data collected during two seasons of a longitudinal geopolitical forecasting tournament. Our first analysis, which compares psychometric traits assessed prior to forecasting, indicates intelligence consistently predicts accuracy. Next, using methods adapted from classical test theory and item response theory, we model latent forecasting skill based on the forecasters’ past accuracy, while accounting for the timing of their forecasts relative to question resolution. Our results suggest these methods perform better at assessing forecasting skill than simpler methods employed by many previous studies. By parsing the data at different time points during the competitions, we assess the relative importance of each information source over time. When past performance information is limited, psychometric traits are useful predictors of future performance, but, as more information becomes available, past performance becomes the stronger predictor of future accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the predictive validity of these results on out-of-sample data, and their utility in producing performance weights for wisdom-of-crowds aggregations.

Child protection systems monitoring is key to ensuring children’s wellbeing. In England, monitoring is rooted in onsite inspection, culminating in judgements ranging from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’. But inspection may carry unintended consequences where child protection systems are weak. One potential consequence is increased child welfare intervention rates. In this longitudinal ecological study of local authorities in England, we used Poisson mixed-effects regression models to assess whether child welfare intervention rates are higher in an inspection year, whether this is driven by inspection judgement, and whether more deprived areas experience different rates for a given inspection judgement. We investigated the impact of inspection on care entry, Child Protection Plan-initiation, and child-in-need status. We found that inspection was associated with a rise in rates across the spectrum of interventions. Worse judgements yielded higher rates. Inspection may also exacerbate existing inequalities. Unlike less deprived areas, more deprived areas judged inadequate did not experience an increase in the less intrusive ‘child-in-need’ interventions. Our findings suggest that a narrow focus on social work practice is unlikely to address weaknesses in the child protection system. Child protection systems monitoring should be guided by a holistic model of systems improvement, encompassing the socioeconomic determinants of quality.

Little is known about the effects of informal care-giving on employees' absenteeism due to illness. This paper therefore provides a longitudinal analysis of the consequences of taking on informal care-giving for men's and women's working hours and workplace absenteeism due to illness. Data were taken from the Dutch Labour Supply Panel (waves 2004–2018); 495 of the 6,452 male observations in this panel and 696 of the 5,961 female observations had taken on informal care-giving. It was tested whether respondents who became (intensive) informal carers were more likely than respondents who remained non-care-givers to reduce their work hours or stop working between waves t and t1, or to be absent from work due to illness in wave t1. (Multinomial) logistic regression analyses showed that taking on informal care reduced women's working hours when the care they provided was intensive, but not men's. The predicted probability of women reducing their work hours was 12 per cent if they had remained non-care-givers between waves t and t1, 15 per cent if they had started giving non-intensive care and 19 per cent if they had begun providing intensive help. In addition, starting to provide (non-intensive) informal care increased the risk of workplace absenteeism among both women and men. The study highlights the need for workplace policies that prevent female carers from reducing their work hours, and enable male and female carers to continue working in a healthy way.

It is understood that ensuring equation balance is a necessary condition for a valid model of times series data. Yet, the definition of balance provided so far has been incomplete and there has not been a consistent understanding of exactly why balance is important or how it can be applied. The discussion to date has focused on the estimates produced by the general error correction model (GECM). In this paper, we go beyond the GECM and beyond model estimates. We treat equation balance as a theoretical matter, not merely an empirical one, and describe how to use the concept of balance to test theoretical propositions before longitudinal data have been gathered. We explain how equation balance can be used to check if your theoretical or empirical model is either wrong or incomplete in a way that will prevent a meaningful interpretation of the model. We also raise the issue of “ $I(0)$ balance” and its importance.

The effects of transgenic corn use and federal biofuel policies on state-level cropping patterns in the US Corn Belt region are investigated using state-level data from 2000 to 2019. During this time, producers moved away from diverse cropping patterns and toward simpler rotational practices. Empirical evidence indicates that the intensification of corn acres planted was positively impacted by the spread of genetically modified (GM) soybeans—used as a proxy for GM corn for biofuel usage—but the effects of biotech advancements on producer planting decisions vary across states. This suggests that future policy changes affecting corn production decisions at the farm level will also be heterogeneous across states.

A growing literature has begun to more closely examine African legislatures. However, most of this research has been attentive to emerging democratic settings, and particularly the experiences of a select number of English-speaking countries. By contrast, Cameroon is a Francophone majority country that reintroduced multiparty politics in the early 1990s but continues to exhibit significant authoritarian tendencies. This article provides a longitudinal analysis of Cameroon's National Assembly and builds on a unique biographical dataset of over 900 members of parliament between 1973 and 2019. The article describes changes in the structure and orientation of the legislature as well as the social profile of its members, in particular following the transition to multipartyism. While the legislature in Cameroon remains primarily a tool of political control, it is more dynamic, and the mechanisms used to manage elites within the context of complex multiethnic politics have evolved.

Centralities are a widely studied phenomenon in network science. In policy networks, central actors are of interest because they are assumed to control information flows, to link opposing coalitions and to directly impact decision-making. First, we study what type of actor (e.g., state authorities or interest groups) is able to occupy central positions in the highly institutionalized context of policy networks. Second, we then ask whether bonding or bridging centralities prove to be more stable over time. Third, we investigate how these types of centrality influence actors’ positions in a network over time. We therefore adopt a longitudinal perspective and run exponential random graph models, including lagged central network positions at t1 as the main independent variable for actors’ activity and popularity at t2. Results confirm that very few actors are able to maintain central positions over time.

China has faced challenges related to the rapid growth of its ageing population, and sleep is one of the public health challenges to this demographic group. This study examines the socio-demographic and behavioural factors associated with status change of sleeping patterns among Chinese older adults, using longitudinal data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS). Socio-demographic factors were selected from the 2012 wave of the CLHLS to examine the sleep status change in the 2014 wave. Multivariable logistic and multinomial regressions were used to study older adults’ changes of sleep quality and daily sleep duration. Older adults, 65 years old or above, were selected as study participants. A higher level of education was negatively associated with poor sleep quality and longer sleep duration (>8 hours). Increasing age was positively associated with both shorter and longer sleep duration. Being female was negatively associated with longer sleep duration. However, exercise status, smoking behaviour and alcohol use all were neither positively nor negatively associated with status change of sleeping patterns. Participants’ education, age and gender might be important factors associated with sleep status change. However, the effects of behavioural factors should be studied further. Policy implications and further research directions are discussed based on empirical results.