Last week, the expected rain was delayed for a few hours and so my husband and I decided to walk the 30 minutes or so into our nearest town to pick up some lightweight supplies. We had a few hours before I needed to be on a Zoom meeting with colleagues in the US and as we came close to our local cathedral the sun came out and we contemplated a cup of tea at a marketplace café. A few minutes later, however, two young women asked us if we knew anything about baby owls! A fluffy little barn owl had been blown out of its nest and was lying on the ground near an enormous beech tree, totally exposed to roaming dogs and vigilant crows. The next hour plus was spent guarding the sleepy little bird (actually not so little and with well-developed talons) waiting for a volunteer from a wildlife sanctuary to arrive. In the end we could wait no more and so we scooped the sleeping bird up, carried it home in our shopping bag and arranged to meet the owl expert there instead. Travelling via bag woke it up and the whole experience became quite magical. It was even alert enough to join my Zoom call from a box! Our walk had been curtailed and café plans thwarted but the afternoon had turned out to be so much better than expected.

People’s lives also don’t turn out as expected. Sometimes this is because unanticipated opportunities open up and those who are in the position to do so are able to make the most of new openings, spread their wings and fly. Other times, we come across barriers that may be too challenging to overcome, at least without outside intervention and help. At the core of our research should not only be a better understanding of what those obstacles are, and how they affect individuals and groups in different ways and to different extents, but what kinds of policies could be put in place and enacted to break down the barriers or, better yet, prevent them from being built in the first place. After all, we didn’t leave the owlet to fend for itself just because it was unlucky enough to fall out of its nest.

The first four papers in this issue focus on the diversity of paths people take after experiencing life events that may be considered less an optimal. These events could be ‘off time’ or result from structural situations or more general, widespread period effects. The first paper by Lee SmithBattle and Louise Flick (2023) ‘A narrative review of teen mothers’ long-term outcomes: what birth cohort studies tell us’ uses information from 20 pieces of research that drew on data from six different countries to address what consequences might really ensue from ‘off-time’ fertility, and childbearing that occurred outside of marriage. Their review of studies published between 1980 and 2019 takes us from an era when it was assumed that ‘The girl who has an illegitimate child at the age of 16 suddenly has 90 percent of her life’s script written for her’ (Campbell, 1968: 238), a conclusion based primarily on cross-sectional or short-term prospective studies that used poor comparison groups. Since then, more rigorous and sophisticated research using longitudinal birth cohort studies, and controlling for vitally important selection biases, has presented a much more nuanced picture. Through underscoring the importance of birth cohort studies, and by placing findings within a temporal and international context, this article both adds to our current understanding of teen mothering, and provides suggested avenues for future policy-directed research.

Alex Bowyer, Richard Dorsett and David Thomson’s (2023) paper on ‘The school-to-work transition for young people who experience custody’ also has direct policy relevance. Recognising potentially long-lasting consequences of adverse circumstances when experienced at young ages, their analysis uses individual-level administrative data to characterise trajectories taken by English youth ages 19–22 years who either experienced custody prior to age 19, or participated in training or education when in prison between ages 19 and 22. Their finding that the majority of young people who experienced custody had not managed to successfully enter the labour market by age 22 is perhaps not unexpected, especially given the disadvantaged backgrounds many young people who experience custody hail from, but the magnitude of the discovery that approximately 80% are NEET (not in employment, education or training) by age 22 is a depressing one. These results cry out for further research – not only in considering various types of programmes to help young people who experience custody to overcome disadvantaged backgrounds through education and training, or adjust to outside pressures upon release, but in rigorous evaluation of these programmes and then potential readjustment as a result of programme assessment and appraisal. It would also be wonderful to flesh out their results more fully with the addition of survey or qualitative data. Matching these results with SmithBattle and Flick’s paper, for example, raises the question of might early childbearing play a part in the discovery that NEET is higher among females than males in this population?

The third paper by Cordula Zabel (2023) on ‘Diversity of employment biographies and prospects of middle-aged welfare recipients’ focuses on a later life course stage and the potential turmoil that spells of unemployment in middle adulthood may produce in later years. This paper utilises register data on Germans who were 45–54 in 2012, employs sequence analysis to help identify characteristics relevant to employment histories prior to then, and then investigates employment outcomes in the six years that follow. Zabel finds that employment biographies are very diverse among middle-aged welfare recipients, which is important to know as a one-size labour market programme clearly will not fit all. By studying whether employment effects of participating in various types of existing German employment policy programmes existing for welfare recipients vary with attributes of people’s employment histories, this paper directly evaluates the degree to which such employment policies are or are not successful, all the while recognising the issue of selectivity among people who remain unemployed for long periods of time.

‘Charting well-being over adulthood into pandemic times: a longitudinal perspective’ by Janine Jongbloed and Lesley Andres (2023) measures well-being from age 28 to age 51 among a cohort of British Columbians between 1998 and 2021, that is, into the COVID-19 pandemic. We know from a multitude of studies that the pandemic resulted in many mental health-related challenges including increased levels of depression and anxiety, feelings of social disconnection and loneliness. One of the most important contributions of this paper is its ability to place changes in well-being associated with the pandemic, which was a sudden and exogenous shock, ‘within the context of individuals’ life histories over time’ and demonstrate that prior trends in well-being do appear important. The data come from the Paths on Life’s Way study and analyses are based on a relatively small subset of respondents who had answered all well-being questions across waves. I can therefore envision some degree of bias towards those reporting fewer well-being issues being included in the study than might be found if there had not been high levels of attrition, but attrition would also be more likely to lead to conservative findings. Future waves of data collection will be useful to address Canadian policies aimed at helping people recover and rebuild post-pandemic.

‘Growing Up in Quebec: the experience of a pilot study’ by Catherine Fontaine, Mai Thanh Tu, Hélène Desrosiers, Delphine Provençal, Nancy Illick and Bertrand Perron (2023) describes the pilot study undertaken to prepare for the second edition of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development, the first edition of which began in 1998 and is still ongoing. This article will be of particular interest to those involved in the collection of longitudinal data, but it also presents a number of findings that underscore some of the ‘new era difficulties’ associated with collecting data in today’s socio-cultural environment, which should be of more general interest. Researchers who rely on secondary data to do their own research will gain a better understanding of some of the myriad underlying methodological decisions that have to be made, and substantive considerations that have to be taken into account when undertaking a major data collection effort such as this one. How to enroll sufficient numbers of particular subgroups as sample respondents, and how to retain them once enrolled, is of particular concern throughout the survey field today. One would hypothesise that monetary enticement should be a greater incentive for low-income families than for those with higher incomes, but the experiment detailed in this paper doesn’t support this hypothesis. What is it that will make a survey pertinent in the lives of respondents? How can we make the process as easy and rewarding for them as possible? The production of this kind of ‘common good’ is not for the fainthearted but the results from this pilot will prove useful for a wide range of proposed and ongoing studies.

The Study Profile included in this issue is described in ‘Trial implementation of a population-level child, adolescent and young adult mental health monitoring system: a study protocol’ by Joyce Cleary, Catherine Nolan, Martin Guhn, Kimberly Thomson, Sophie Barker, Camille Deane, Christopher Greenwood, Julia Tulloh Harper, Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, Primrose Letcher, Jacqui MacDonald, Delyse Hutchinson, Liz Spry, Meredith O’Connor, Vaughan Carr, Melissa Green, Tom Peachey, John Toumbourou, Jane Hosking, Jerri Nelson, Joanne Williams, Stephen Zubrick, Ann Sanson, Kate Lycett and Craig Olsson (Cleary et al, 2023). One of the most important lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemi is the importance of mental and not just physical well-being, and from longitudinal research we know that investments made in the early years can reach far into the lifecourse. This profile describes the development, and pilot implementation, of a new Australian Comprehensive Monitoring System (CMS) to measure social and emotional development across all ages and stages from infancy through to young adulthood at three-year intervals. Family, school, peer, digital and community social climates that form the contexts within which children live and grow are also measured. The project is both exciting and ambitious, especially in terms of hoped for response rates in today’s climate, but the attention being paid to community buy-in through meaningful community partnership is an excellent way to try and achieve success.