Ethics approval & review
The study is conducted under formal ethics approvals, with ongoing oversight of how data is collected, linked and used.
Home / Methodology
How we do it
Two complementary methods, secure record linkage and a direct childhood survey, joined under careful governance to study a whole generation without compromising privacy.
Method 01
Population record linkage
Across childhood, information about a child is recorded by many different services, in health, in education and in community settings. Each holds a fragment of the story. Record linkage is the technique that brings those fragments together for the same child, so the full developmental picture can be studied.
Crucially, this is done without researchers ever seeing identities. A trusted linkage process matches records behind a protective barrier, then passes only de-identified information to the research team. The people who analyse the data and the details that could identify a child are kept strictly apart.
Working at population scale means the study reflects the real diversity of NSW children, rather than a narrow or self-selecting sample.
Method 02
The childhood survey
Records describe what services observe. The Middle Childhood Survey adds the child's own voice, captured at a shared point in middle primary school across NSW government, Catholic and independent schools.
The instrument was developed to be age-appropriate and to span five developmental domains, social, emotional, cognitive, physical and language, so the study sees the whole child rather than a single trait.
When survey responses are read together with linked records, each method strengthens the other, supporting richer and more reliable conclusions.
The long view
A cohort followed over time
What makes the study longitudinal is that the same cohort is observed repeatedly as it ages. This design lets researchers see not just where children are, but how they got there, and what came next.
Following children forward, rather than reconstructing the past, reduces guesswork about cause and timing. It is the difference between a photograph and a film.
Ethics & privacy
The safeguards behind the science
Every method described above operates within a framework designed to protect the children and families whose information makes this research possible.
De-identification
Identifying details are removed before analysis. Researchers work only with information that cannot be traced to an individual.
Separation of duties
The roles of linking records and analysing them are kept apart, so no single party holds both identity and research data.
Disclosure control
Outputs are checked before release to prevent any result from inadvertently revealing information about a person.
Funded through competitive national research grants and delivered with agency partners, the study is built to meet the high standards expected of work with children's data.
For researchers
Put the methodology to work.
Learn how approved researchers can access the study's de-identified data for their own projects.