Coping and protection - A longitudinal study of children and their mothers

The principal objective is to attain knowledge about pathways to good social competence or mental health problems among children and their mothers. The longitudinal perspective implies studying health outcomes among children associated with age typical de velopment, and maternal health outcomes associated with the changing challenges of motherhood and in the relationship with the partner. The necessary data will be collected from an ongoing epidemiological project, which has followed a community based samp le of more than 500 families - the TOPP-project. Information about social skills and symptom level, together with information about environmental risk and protective factors, child temperament, and maternal temperament and coping strategies, has been col lected in five waves, from the children were 18 months until they reached the age of 12. In addition to information from the mothers, the TOPP-project has collected information from the children/adolescents themselves when they were 12 years old. In 2006 we plan to collect more data from the mothers and their 14 year old adolescents. This upcoming data collection wave will also include information from the fathers. We will make use of both variable-oriented and person-oriented analyses of longitudinal p athways. Person-oriented analyses will focus on typical development of skills, difficulties and symptoms over shorter and longer time periods. This will entail both explorative analyses (i.e., cluster analysis and related methods) and parametric models (e .g., semi-parametric trajectory analyses or growth mixture models). The PhD student will be a part of a group established around the TOPP-project with researchers from the University of Oslo, The Norwegian Centre for the Studies of Behaviour Problems an d Innovative Practise, and the Regional Centre. The project also has active collaboration with professors from the University of Melbourne, Australia and from Oregon Social Learning Center, USA.