Despite various limitations with the way
GUS collects income information, this longitudinal measure of poverty can be used to compare GUS children with different durations of living in low - income households.
First we should reiterate that our measure of poverty may not be precise, most notably because
GUS collects income information using just one question rather than as part of a detailed exercise.
Not exact matches
GUS is an important data source in studying this area because it
collects information on the same children over time.
To date,
GUS has
collected information about three «cohorts» of children: a child cohort and two birth cohorts - altogether, information has been
collected on about 14,000 children.
(Note that although having parents who are unmarried is a «current» predictor of a poor father - child relationship, there is no information
collected at the
GUS age 10 interview on the current quality of the partner relationship.
Future work will seek to strengthen this finding using teacher - reported measures of child wellbeing
collected at age 10 (but not available for this study), and by examining father - child relationships at age 10 in relation to children's wellbeing measured in future sweeps of
GUS.
GUS plans to
collect further information on parent - child relationships and socio - emotional wellbeing when children are in their first year at secondary school (sweep 9).
Unfortunately,
GUS has not
collected information on children's relationships with non-resident fathers at the age 10 interview, although this is planned for the next round of data collection when children are in their first year of secondary school.
At each sweep of
GUS data collection, information was
collected from the main carer (usually the child's mother) on whether the child experienced any disturbing family events from a pre-determined list since the previous sweep.
GUS did not
collect information from fathers on supportiveness.