’SPOR – Children’s development and wellbeing throughout life’ – along with the accompanying research – is a longitudinal study aiming to provide knowledge about the connection between early circumstances in children’s lives and their wellbeing and welfare later in life.
The overall aim of the study is to answer questions such as: How do circumstances early in children’s lives affect their wellbeing and welfare later in life? When do the well-known gaps in children’s abilities appear, which prove so important in school and later in life?
Despite international recognition of Danish registry data, few data exist for studying toddlers’ and pre-school children’s development and wellbeing, and for determining whether they encounter social challenges and social interventions early in life. This makes it difficult to investigate the long-term effects of early interventions and investments in Denmark.
SPOR is a strategic investment aimed at filling this gap in the data on children’s lives. SPOR will improve the ability to acquire:
- Knowledge about (small) Danish children’s development and wellbeing over time
- Knowledge about the connection between circumstances in children’s lives and their wellbeing and welfare later in life
- Knowledge about the impact of circumstances related to children’s daily lives and specific interventions that focus on children’s development and wellbeing – including the impact of interventions targeting vulnerable children and their families.
In SPOR, we expect to follow more than 60,000 children from early childhood to adulthood. Through a web-based questionnaire survey for the parents of the children, we will obtain knowledge about the children’s wellbeing and development (e.g. socio-emotional development and language), as well as their close relationships and daily life at home and in daycare, which constitute an important part of children’s lives.
The first round of the SPOR was conducted between October 2017 and September 2018 and included 52,010 children in three age groups: 9 months, 2 years and 3 years. The second round was carried out between October 2019 and December 2020 and included the now 3, 4 and 5-year-old children, as well as a new cohort of 9-month-old children.
SPOR is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and rate pool funds.
This is a presentation video about SPOR that was made when the project commenced in 2017. Regrettably, the video is in Danish and no subtitles are available.