Survey of the development and well-being of children and adolescents - Three year follow-up

In 1999, ONS carried out the first national survey of the mental health of children and adolescents living in private households in Great Britain. The survey was carried out on behalf of the Department for Health, Scottish Executive and National Assembly for Wales. The purpose of the 1999 survey was to provide information about the prevalence of mental disorders among 5 - 15 year olds in order to inform policy decisions about the need for child and adolescent mental health services. Data were collected on 10,500 children.

Eighteen months later, a specially selected sample of the original respondents (1000 parents of children with a disorder and 3000 parents of children with no disorder) was chosen to be followed up by means of a postal survey.

Three years after the original contact, interviewers attempted to re-contact all those who had completed and returned the eighteen month follow-up postal questionnaire and approximately 300 children who were found to have a disorder in the 1999 survey but had not returned the postal questionnaire. The set sample was 3245 children now aged between 8 - 18 years.

The main aims of the three-year follow-up survey are to investigate:

• The persistence of disorders
• The effect of the transition stages from primary to secondary education and from adolescence to young adulthood
• Whether children in the non-disorder group in the original survey who were exposed to the risk factors thought to increase the likelihood of mental disorders developed mental disorders, and if not, what were the protective factors
• Outcomes (clinical and non-clinical) related to the course of the disorder

In order to obtain a complete picture of children's behaviour, information was collected from up to three sources:

The fieldwork was carried out between January - March 2002. Contact was made with 90% of the set sample. Excluding ineligible cases interviews were completed about 88% of the children (2595).

An essential part of this follow-up survey was a request to consent for a child psychiatrist to telephone them after they had completed their interviews. The purpose of this exercise is to get more detailed information on service use, particularly to get information related to CAMHS framework. Semi-structured interviewing techniques are being used to get parents to describe the assessment and treatment in enough detail to categorise the type of agency, the sort of professional and the nature of the treatment.

A first draft of the report is planned for March 2003.

This page last revised: Thursday, 4 July 2002