Contents

• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes ix

• Notes on Contributors xii

• Foreword: Understanding and Enhancing Human Development Among Global Youth – On the Unique Value of Developmentally Oriented Longitudinal Research

  Richard M. Lerner xxvii

1. Introduction: Measuring Sustainable Human Development Across the Life Course

   Prerna Banati 1

2. 1Exploring the Potential for Gender Norm Change in Adolescent Girls: Evidence from ‘Real Choices, Real Lives’ Longitudinal, Qualitative Study Data

   Jenny Rivett and Lilli Loveday 25

3. 2Unequal Educational Trajectories: The Case of Ethiopia

   Ilze Plavgo 43

4. 3Early Life Transitions Increase the Risk for HIV Infection: Using Latent Class Growth Models to Assess the Effect of Key Life Events on HIV Incidence Among Adolescent Girls in Rural South Africa

   Audrey Pettifor, Emily Agnew, Torsten B. Neilands, Jennifer Ahern, Stephen Tollman, Kathleen Kahn and Sheri A. Lippman 69

5. 4Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Evidence from the Longitudinal Parenting Across Cultures Project

   Jennifer E. Lansford, W. Andrew Rothenberg, Sombat Tapanya, Liliana Maria Uribe Tirado, Saengduean Yotanyamaneewong, Liane Peña Alampay, Suha M. Al-Hassan, Dario Bacchini, Marc H. Bornstein, Lei Chang, Kirby Deater-Deckard, Laura Di Giunta, Kenneth A. Dodge, Sevtap Gurdal, Qin Liu, Qian Long, Patrick S. Malone, Paul Oburu, Concetta Pastorelli, Ann T. Skinner, Emma Sorbring and Laurence Steinberg 89

6. 5Achieving Gender Equality: Understanding Gender Equality and Health Among Vulnerable Adolescents in the Sustainable Development Goals Era

   Leah R. Koenig, Mengmeng Li and Robert W. Blum 113

7. 6Capturing the Complexities of Adolescent Transitions Through a Mixed Methods Longitudinal Research Design

   Sarah Baird, Nicola Jones, Bassam Abu Hamad, Maheen Sultan and Workneh Yadete 135

8. 7Child Well-being Across the Life Course: What Do We Know, What Should We Know?

   Gary Pollock, Haridhan Goswami and Aleksandra Szymczyk 165

9. 8Mauritian Joint Child Health Project: A Multigenerational Family Study Emerging from a Prospective Birth Cohort Study: Initial Alcohol-related Outcomes in the Offspring Generation

   Susan E. Luczak, Shameem Oomur, Kristina Jackson and Tashneem Mahoomed 193

• Conclusion: The Future of Longitudinal Research

  Prerna Banati 233

• Index 249

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes

Notes on Contributors

Bassam Abu Hamad has a PhD in Human Resource Management and is Associate Professor of Public Health at Al-Quds University, Israel, and currently, General Coordinator of the Public Health master’s degree programmes in Gaza. Bassam is also Associate Director (Middle East and North Africa [MENA] region) of the longitudinal research programme Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE). Abu Hamad focuses on public health policies and programming, social determinants of health, vulnerabilities of refugees, women and children, psychosocial, disability and violence in conflict-affected settings.

Emily Agnew is Research Specialist at the University of California San Francisco, USA. Her research focuses on the development of mathematical modelling and statistical techniques, and their application in understanding the transmission of HIV and its interactions with interventions, to predict outcomes in disease incidence, cost-effectiveness and, ultimately, public health policy.

Jennifer Ahern is Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Epidemiology at University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, USA. She examines the effects of the social and physical environment, and programmes and policies that alter the social and physical environment, on many aspects of health (such as violence, substance use, mental health and gestational health). Dr Ahern has a methodological focus to her work, including application of causal inference methods and semi-parametric estimation approaches, aimed at improving the rigour of observational research, and optimizing public health intervention planning. Her research has been supported by a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of the Director.

Suha M. Al-Hassan is Associate Professor at the Hashemite University, Jordan, and Emirates College for Advanced Education (ECAE), UAE. Al-Hassan holds a BA in Psychology and MEd in Special Education from Jordan University and a PhD in Early Childhood Special Education and Applied Behaviour Analysis from The Ohio State University. While at ECAE Al-Hassan held the positions of Academic Dean and Chair of the graduate programmes and professional development. Prior to joining ECAE, Al-Hassan was Dean of Queen Rania Faculty for Childhood at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Al-Hassan has consulted for several national and international agencies, such as UNICEF, on matters pertaining to childhood and special education. Her research focus includes parenting and child development, parental involvement in education, school readiness and cross-cultural research.

Liane Peña Alampay is Professor of Psychology at the Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. Her research focuses on parenting and child and adolescent development in cultural contexts and interventions for youth and families at risk. She is Principal Investigator of Parenting for Lifelong Health (Philippines), which aims to culturally adapt and test evidence-based parent support interventions to prevent child maltreatment among vulnerable Filipino families.

Dario Bacchini is Full Professor of Developmental Psychology and Education at the department of Humanistic Studies, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy, where he is also Coordinator of the Doctoral Programme in ‘Mind, Gender and Language’. His research interests focus on antisocial behavior in adolescence, moral development, school bullying and parenting. He leads many interventions to prevent school bullying. He is a consultant to the local government for the school policy related to disruptive and bullying behaviours.

Sarah Baird is Associate Professor of Global Health and Economics at George Washington University, USA, where she focuses on the microeconomics of health and education in low- and middle-income countries with an emphasis on gender and youth. She is also Impact Evaluation Lead for the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) programme. Her current work investigates different policy approaches to improve outcomes for adolescents ranging from cash transfers, to group interpersonal psychotherapy, to social norms change.

Prerna Banati has over 20 years of experience advancing evidence and research for United Nations agencies and other international organizations. Currently she is a senior advisor at UNICEF where she has been supporting evidence generation and providing technical advice to rights-based country programmes of cooperation in collaboration with governments, civil society and the private sector. Over her career, she has led a number of high-profile action-research programmes, most recently a Department for International Development-funded gender-responsive, adolescent-sensitive social protection, and prior to that on the social and structural determinants of adolescent well-being. She also developed and led the Global Longitudinal Research Initiative (GLORI), a network of cohort studies following children and adolescents living across diverse contexts and countries. Before joining UNICEF, she was Takemi Fellow at Harvard University and has worked for the World Health Organization and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, and also in academia, for NGOs and in the private sector. She sits on a number of advisory boards and has authored many publications in the field of adolescent health and well-being, reproductive health, mental health, HIV prevention and migration. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Robert W. Blum is Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA. He has edited two books and written over 325 journal articles, book chapters and special reports. He is a past-president of the Society for Adolescent Medicine and a past chair of the Guttmacher Institute Board of Directors. In 2006, he was elected to the US National Academy of Medicine. He is a consultant to the World Bank, UNICEF, UNFPA and the WHO. His honours include both the APHA Herbert Needleman Award ‘for scientific achievement and courageous advocacy’ and the Martha May Eliot Award honouring ‘extraordinary service to mothers and children [and adolescents]’. He is Principal Investigator of the 11-country Global Early Adolescent Study and co-Principal Investigator on the National Adolescent Mental Health Surveys, a three-country adolescent mental health study in Kenya, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Marc H. Bornstein holds a BA from Columbia College, USA, MS and PhD degrees from Yale University, USA, honorary doctorates from the University of Padua and University of Trento, Italy, and an Honorary Professorship at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Bornstein is President Emeritus of the Society for Research in Child Development, and he has held faculty positions at Princeton University and New York University, USA, as well as visiting academic appointments in Bamenda (Cameroon), Bristol, London, Munich, New York, Oxford, Paris, Santiago (Chile), Seoul, Tokyo, Trento and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London). Bornstein is Editor Emeritus of Child Development and founding Editor of Parenting: Science and Practice. He has administered both Federal and Foundation grants, sits on the editorial boards of several professional journals, is a member of scholarly societies in a variety of disciplines, and consults for governments, foundations, universities, publishers, the media and UNICEF. Bornstein has published widely in experimental, methodological, comparative, developmental and cultural science as well as neuroscience, paediatrics and aesthetics.

Lei Chang was born in Tianjin, China, received his BA from Hebei University, Baoding, China, and his MS and PhD from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is Chair Professor of Psychology and Head of Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Macau, and previously taught at University of Central Florida, USA, the Chinese University of Hong Kong – where he was also Department Head – and the Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, where he was a chair professor. He conducts research in the areas of evolutionary psychology (including cultural evolution and social learning, life history and childhood environmental impact, and sociosexuality and human mating behaviour research), developmental science focusing on parenting and child and adolescent social and cognitive development, and statistics and psychometrics where he focuses on applications and textbooks.

Kirby Deater-Deckard is Professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, where he serves as area leader in developmental science, graduate programme director in neuroscience and behaviour and director of the Healthy Development Initiative in Springfield, MA. He received his BA from The Pennsylvania State University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. Deater-Deckard’s research focuses on the transactions between biological, cognitive and environmental factors in the development and intergenerational transmission of self-regulation and related psychological and health outcomes. His collaborative research is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. His current research focuses specifically on the development and intergenerational transmission of individual differences in executive function and the role of parenting and broader contextual factors that can influence these developmental processes.

Laura Di Giunta is Associate Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Her research focuses on continuity and change of individual differences in predicting youth (mal)adjustment, accounting for socialization and culture factors, especially in emotion regulation, adjustment and social competence. With the support of the Jacobs Foundation, her research is aimed at disentangling the emotion regulation-related mechanisms predictive of youth adjustment. Her work relies on mobile ecological momentary assessments of youth emotion regulation-related mechanisms with both normative and clinical adolescent samples, and a focus on physiological indicators of youth emotion regulation.

Kenneth A. Dodge is the Pritzker Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, USA. He studies the development and prevention of aggressive and violent behaviours. His work provides a model for understanding how some young children grow up to engage in aggression and violence and provides a framework for intervening early to prevent the costly consequences of violence for children and their communities.

Haridhan Goswami is Senior Lecturer in sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has expertise in research with children’s and young people’s subjective well-being, survey design, testing reliability and validity of data collection instruments and multivariate analysis of data. Goswami has provided expert advice on research with children and young people and their subjective well-being to two European Commission-funded projects: MYWEB and European Cohort Development Project. He has also led statistical analysis of large-scale survey data for a number of national and international projects, including MYPLACE (funded by European Commission), National Surveys (2008, 2010) on Child Well-being in England (funded by The Children’s Society) and Safeguarding Young People: Professionals’ Attitudes and Responses to Maltreated Children (funded by the National Lottery). Goswami is Principal Investigator of the Child Well-Being Survey in Bangladesh which is being conducted in collaboration with Children’s Worlds: The International Survey of Children’s Well-Being. He is Coordinator of the South Asian Research Network for Childhood and Youth Studies (SARNCYS: https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/mcys/south-asian-network/) at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Sevtap Gurdal is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Child and Youth Studies at University West, Sweden. She earned her PhD in Psychology from Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her research interests are parenting and children. Earlier research projects include parent attributions, parent attitudes and child agency in different contexts. Her ongoing research is about professionals’ work and experiences about internet gaming disorder and children’s agency. She also has a gender perspective on gaming disorder.

Kristina Jackson is Professor (Research) at the Centre for Alcohol and Addiction Studies in the Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences at Brown University, USA. Her research largely centres on the developmental course of substance use among adolescents and young adults. She has an extensive history of research funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse to examine individual- and contextual-level risk factors for substance use initiation and progression to increasingly severe use among adolescents. She has also conducted work on the remission of substance involvement in college students and across young adulthood, and employs fine-grained approaches to study co-use of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana. She is an expert in the application of quantitative methods to the study of substance use and has received several career awards to apply developmental methods to research in underage substance use.

Nicola Jones is Principal Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in the UK. She is Director of the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) longitudinal research programme. Her research focuses on the experiences of young people in developmental and humanitarian contexts, and the ways in which policies and programmes can strengthen their capabilities and well-being. She is co-editor of Empowering Adolescents in Developing Countries: Gender Justice and Norm Change (2018) and Social Policy in the Middle East and North Africa: The New Social Protection Paradigm and Universal Coverage (2019).

Kathleen Kahn is Personal Professor in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and executive scientist in the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt). A physician with a PhD in public health and epidemiology, Kahn has spent over 25 years working in rural South Africa and regionally. Since inception of the Agincourt health and socio-demographic surveillance system in 1992, she has led work on mortality and cause of death measurement, using verbal autopsy to track transitions over a period of dramatic socio-political change and the HIV epidemic. Her research focuses on adolescent and young adult health and development including HIV prevention, non-communicable disease risk and mental health, as well as a life course approach to health and ageing.

Leah R. Koenig is a doctoral student in the field of Epidemiology and Translational Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, USA. From 2017 to 2020 she served as Assistant Study Director of the Global Early Adolescent Study at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research interests include life course, mixed methods and social epidemiology approaches to the areas of gender inequality and sexual and reproductive health research.

Jennifer E. Lansford is Research Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy and Faculty Fellow of the Centre for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, USA. She earned her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. Lansford leads the Parenting Across Cultures Project. Lansford has consulted for UNICEF on evaluations of parenting programmes and on the development of a set of international standards for parenting programmes. She serves in editorial roles on several academic journals and has served in a number of national and international leadership roles, including chairing the US National Institutes of Health Psychosocial Development, Risk and Prevention Study Section; chairing the U. National Committee for Psychological Science of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; and chairing the Society for Research in Child Development International Affairs Committee.

Richard M. Lerner is the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and Director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University, USA. Lerner has more than 700 scholarly publications, including more than 80 authored or edited books. He was Founding Editor of the Journal of Research on Adolescence and of Applied Developmental Science. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Lerner is the 2013 recipient of the APA Division 7 Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society, the 2014 recipient of the APA Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology and the 2015 recipient of the APA Ernest R. Hilgard Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Career Contributions to General Psychology. He received the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Behavioural Development in 2016, and the Society for Research in Child Development Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy and Practice in Child Development in 2017. He is also the recipient of the 2020 APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, for lifetime outstanding contributions to applied psychological research.

Mengmeng Li is Research Associate at the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA. Since 2017 she has worked as the senior data analyst for the Global Early Adolescent Study under the leadership of Robert W. Blum. Her research interests focus on maternal, fetal and perinatal health related to Assisted Reproductive Technology, and on adolescent health in the field of gender inequality and mental health. She is currently a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studying Maternal and Child Health with a concentration on Epidemiology Research Methods.

Sheri A. Lippman is an epidemiologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. Lippman’s research focuses on the identification of the key social and structural factors that influence health behaviours and vulnerability to HIV/STI, and interventions to address social and structural barriers to HIV prevention, testing and treatment.

Qin Liu is Professor of Maternal and Child Health at the School of Public Health and Management at Chongqing Medical University, China. Her research interests and experiences focus on evidence-based synthesis, child growth and development, child mental health and behaviours, child nutrition, health education and interventions for children and families. She is particularly interested in initiation mechanisms and influencing factors of pubertal development.

Qian Long is Assistant Professor of Global Health in the Global Health Research Centre, Duke Kunshan University, China. She had medical and international health training in China and the Netherlands. She completed a doctoral degree at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and had postdoctoral training at the Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, USA, and Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests and experiences focus on equity issues in relation to health systems development, including maternal and child health, tuberculosis control, and non-communicable disease management in poor areas and among vulnerable groups of China and other low- and middle-income countries. She is a youth member of the Global Health Committee, Chinese Preventive Medical Association. She was a technical officer in the Department of Reproductive Health and Research, the World Health Organization, working in the area of maternal and perinatal health.

Lilli Loveday is Research Manager for ‘Real Choices, Real Lives’ at Plan International UK. Her research, as well as her wider programmatic and advisory work, focuses on gender (including gender-based violence), gender equality and rights, as well as understanding processes of change (norms/behaviour). Alongside her research work, Lilli provides technical expertise on gender and social norms change to support NGO interventions in the global south. Previously, she worked in West Africa to support the implementation of a human rights programme (focusing on women’s health and women’s rights) to promote positive social change. She has also undertaken qualitative research on women’s economic participation, female genital cutting (FGC) in The Gambia, the impacts of drought on children’s long-term well-being and the impacts of cash transfers, including on social dynamics.

Susan E. Luczak is Professor (Research) in the Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California, USA, and Co-International Director of the Joint Child Health Project (JCHP). Her research focuses on the life course development of alcohol use and problems and its measurement under naturalistic conditions. She has been Principal Investigator of JCHP research projects funded by grants from the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (K08 AA014265, R01 AA18179) and a Fulbright Scholar Award in the African Regional Research Programme from the US Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (8465-MC). The research was conducted in collaboration with the University of Mauritius, the Mauritian Ministry of Health and Quality of Life and the Mauritian Ministry of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare. In addition to her research conducted in Mauritius, her two other major lines of research focus on genetic and environmental risk and protective factors for drinking in American university students, and real-time measurement of alcohol consumption including web app monitoring, wearable biosensors and the conversion of transdermal alcohol data into estimated levels of breath and blood alcohol concentration.

Tashneem Mahoomed is National Director of the Joint Child Health Project (JCHP), a research organization founded in 1972 with funding from the World Health Organization in collaboration with the Mauritian Ministry of Health, professors from the USA (Sarnoff Mednick), UK (Peter Venables), Europe (Fini Schulsinger) and Cyril Dalais in Mauritius as the first JCHP National Director. She has been Principal Investigator of the JCHP subcontracts for multiple US National Institutes of Health-funded research projects headed by Professor Susan Luczak from the University of Southern California and Professor Adrian Raine from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of South Africa (Pretoria) in Psychology and Information Technology in 2003 and has been with the JCHP since 2004. Her research focus is on psychophysiology, including brain function (electroencephalography, event-related potentials), skin conductance and cardiovascular function.

Patrick S. Malone is Senior Research Scientist with the Duke University Centre for Child and Family Policy, USA. His specialization is quantitative psychology, and his independent research programme focuses on developing statistical models of change over time, especially in health behaviours and developmental psychopathology. He is particularly interested in novel approaches to understanding ethnic and cultural differences in adolescent substance use and other health risk behaviours.

Torsten B. Neilands is a quantitative methodologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Neilands heads the Methods Core at the UCSF Centre for AIDS Prevention Studies and leads NIH-sponsored programmes to train the next generation of social and behavioural HIV/AIDS scientists conducting research in the minority communities most disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic.

Paul Oburu is Associate Professor in Child Development at Maseno University, Kenya, where he also served as the Director of Quality Assurance and Performance Management. His research interests include parenting, caregiving stress, mental health and adjustment problems of grandmother caregivers and orphaned children. His other research interests include caregiving challenges experienced by adolescent children taking care of other equally vulnerable siblings. Previously, he was the founding director of a global network of education researchers called Education Quality and Learning for all based at New York University, USA.

Shameem Oomur is Research Coordinator at the Joint Child Health Project (JCHP). She has been with the JCHP since 2008 conducting research funded by both the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. Her position as JCHP Research Coordinator includes supervising all clinical interviews and overseeing data management in addition to manuscript preparation. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Mauritius in Social Science with Specialization in Psychology in 2003. Her research emphasis is on clinical diagnosis and naturalistic recovery from addiction.

Concetta Pastorelli earned her laurea degree in psychology and PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She is a full professor at the Department of Psychology of Sapienza University of Rome, and Director of the Interuniversity Centre for the Research in the Genesis and Development of Prosocial and Antisocial Motivations. She has been Director of the PhD Programme in Psychology and Social Neuroscience and the Master Programme in Health and Community Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome. Pastorelli has consulted for the Italian Ministry of Education on evaluations of life skills programmes and on the development of prevention programmes in Italian high schools. Her research projects include interventions to promote prosocial behaviors and academic achievement in different cultural contexts. Her research focuses on the determinants of aggressive and prosocial behaviours and school achievement, parental personality and parenting and children’s and adolescents’ adjustment.

Audrey Pettifor is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and Honorary Professor of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research focuses on sexual behaviour and determinants of HIV/STI infection in sub-Saharan Africa. Her goal is to identify modifiable risk factors and develop novel interventions to prevent new HIV infections – particularly among adolescents and young women. Pettifor has expertise in sexual behavior, HIV prevention, HIV testing and structural interventions among adolescents and young adults in sub-Saharan Africa, and has published extensively in the area of HIV and sexual behaviour among youth in sub-Saharan Africa. Pettifor has worked in South Africa for over 20 years and has also conducted research in Malawi, Madagascar, Kenya, Zimbabwe and the Demographic Republic of Congo.

Ilze Plavgo is Research Associate and PhD candidate at the European University Institute (EUI) in Italy. She holds an MA in international relations (UK) and an MSc in public policy and human development (the Netherlands). Her main research areas include inequality, poverty, education and social policy. Prior to the EUI, she worked as a social and economic policy analyst at the UNICEF Office of Research (Italy) where her primary research focus was on multidimensional poverty and child well-being. She has consulted for over a dozen UNICEF country offices on the measurement of child poverty and social protection systems. Her work has been published/is forthcoming in leading journals in the field such as Child Indicators Research and the Journal of European Social Policy, as well as in numerous United Nations publications. In her current research, she studies developments of social investment policies and their effect on well-being, employment and poverty among families with children.

Gary Pollock is Professor of Sociology in the Policy Evaluation and Research Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. For over 25 years he has conducted research on young people, principally using questionnaire survey methods. Pollock is a specialist in both longitudinal and international comparative survey methodology having worked on the British Household Panels survey since its original release and on a range of EU-funded projects on the employment and family context of their life course. Most recently he is leading the development of an input-harmonized, Europe-wide, accelerated birth cohort survey which focuses on collecting policy-relevant data to enhance child and young people’s well-being over their life (https://www.eurocohort.eu/).

Jenny Rivett is an independent research consultant providing research support to the Plan International UK ‘Real Choices, Real Lives’ study since 2018. Her research covers a range of thematic areas including gender and adolescence, human rights and social norm change, with a particular focus on violence against children (VAC) and child protection. Her recent work includes a rigorous review of the impact of parenting programmes on adolescent mental health and experiences of violence, a rapid evidence assessment of programmes to protect children on the move and analysis of the intersections between climate change, security and VAC. Her work on the ‘Real Choices, Real Lives’ study focuses on longitudinal, qualitative analysis of the process of gender socialization and adolescent girls’ everyday acts of resistance.

W. Andrew Rothenberg is Research Scientist at the Centre for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, USA, and a Clinical Associate at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Mailman Center for Child Development, USA. He holds a BA from North Carolina State University, USA, and an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. A clinical psychologist by training, Rothenberg investigates the intergenerational transmission of parenting and family processes in cultures around the world, explores strategies to prevent the intergenerational transmission of maladaptive parenting and family processes and implements preventative interventions in medically underserved communities.

Ann T. Skinner is Research Project Manager at the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy, USA. She earned her BA in Psychology and MEd in Special Education from the College of William and Mary, USA, and is a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at Gothenburg University, Sweden, and University West, Sweden. Her research focuses on the ways in which stressful community, familial and interpersonal events impact parent-child relationships and the development of aggression in youth. She has extensive experience in data management of multisite projects and in supervising teams for school- and community-based data collection.

Emma Sorbring is Professor of Child and Youth Studies and research director for the Centre for Child and Youth Studies at University West, Sweden. She earned her PhD and became Associate Professor in Psychology at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her research and teaching interests focus on children, adolescents and families. Her projects focus on parental behaviour and children’s adjustment, young people’s decision-making, teenagers’ internet use and parental strategies and sexual development in traditional and new settings (the internet). She serves in editorial roles on several academic journals and books. She has published several Swedish books on parenting, youth studies and methods, as well as international book chapters in the same areas.

Laurence Steinberg is Professor of Psychology at Temple University, USA, and an affiliate of King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. His research focuses on psychological and brain development in adolescence.

Maheen Sultan is Senior Fellow of Practice and a founder of the Centre for Gender and Social Transformation at the BRAC Development Institute, BRAC University, Bangladesh. She is a development practitioner with over 25 years’ experience in social development, poverty, civil society and community participation and gender equality. Sultan is also a women’s rights activist and a member of Naripokkho, a Bangladeshi women’s rights organization. She is co-editor of Voicing Demands: Feminist Activism in Transitional Contexts (2014).

Aleksandra Szymczyk is Research Associate at the Policy Evaluation and Research Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She has been working on the Horizon 2020 European Cohort Development Project (ECDP), which has created the specification and business case for a European Research Infrastructure providing comparative cross-European longitudinal data on child and youth well-being. Currently, she is conducting research activities for the Horizon 2020 Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe Project (MiCREATE), which strives to stimulate inclusion of diverse groups of migrant children by adopting a child-centered approach to migrant children integration on an educational and policy level.

Sombat Tapanya is a clinical psychologist and an independent researcher at the Peace Culture Foundation, Thailand. His research and clinical practice focus on psychological trauma resulting from harsh parenting and abuse and the treatment and prevention of such trauma. He works with Save the Children International and UNICEF in Thailand and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations region.

Liliana Maria Uribe Tirado is Full Professor at Universidad de San Buenaventura, Colombia. She is actively involved in the implementation of a school-based intervention called CEPIDEA (Promoting Prosocial and Emotional Skills to Counteract Externalizing Problems in Adolescence in Colombia), aimed at promoting prosocial behavior in middle schools. She has also collaborated in the implementation of a research project that examines the promotive nature of identity development for adolescents in Colombia, Chile and the United States.

Stephen Tollman is Founding Director of the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit, South Africa. Trained in African and US/UK institutions, his professional life is based in South Africa with extensive efforts building advanced research capability in African settings. In the early 1990s, he led establishment of the Agincourt Field Research Centre which, based on long-term health and socio-demographic surveillance, provides a platform for the SA Medical Research Council’s only group addressing rural health and the rapid health and social transitions underway. Extensive observational work is complemented by interventions and evaluations addressing critical periods along the life course. The empirically derived mortality and cause-of-death series informs work on chronic conditions and is among the richest on the continent. This mortality series and related surveillance data, linked to health service registers, offer new insights into the complex demographic, epidemiological and social transitions underway. Tollman served as first Board Chair of the INDEPTH Network 2002-2006, leads INDEPTH multicenter efforts addressing Adult Health and Aging in Africa and Asia and recently played an instrumental role setting up the SA Population Research Infrastructure Network (SAPRIN).

Workneh Yadete has a master’s degree in History from Addis Ababa University. He has more than 15 years of experiencing working with children, adolescents and young people in Ethiopia. Among his key research experiences, he has worked as a qualitative researcher for 10 years for Young Lives, a longitudinal 15-year and multi-country research project led by the University of Oxford, UK. Since 2017, Workneh has been working for the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) programme as Country Research Uptake and Impact Coordinator and Qualitative Research Lead. He is also Managing Director of the Quest Research training and consultancy firm which conducts social research in Ethiopia. His areas of interest include education and learning, gender norms and adolescents’ transition, child labour, health and sexual and reproductive health, migration and internal displacement.

Saengduean Yotanyamaneewong is a clinical psychologist and Lecturer in the Psychology Department, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Her research and teaching interests focus on children, adolescents and families. Her projects focus on parenting, parental burnout and emotional and social development in children and adolescents.