TCELT Research seminar - August 2025

Speaker Biography

Maddi is a final-year PhD student in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research uses Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) longitudinal birth cohort data to investigate the impact of significant life events and structural inequalities on children’s social and emotional development. This project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and supervised by Dr(s) Valeria Skafida and Emma Davidson. Her research interests include statistical methods, measurement and incorporating youth voices in quantitative research, and she co-organises a PGR and ECR research network connecting social survey analysts. She holds an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology, and an MSc in Social Research, from Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science.
 

Abstract

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) present a leading framework for studying event-exposure in childhood and dominate Scottish youth and family policies. Numerous studies find associative relationships between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and mental health outcomes, but such research is also widely critiqued for failing to control for the confounding effects of structural inequalities and for under-theorising the role of positive experiences. Furthermore, the distinction between events, changes, and chronic experiences are often not disentangled in existing childhood experiences research.

This paper borrows the concept of “critical moments or events” from life transitions research to address some of the research gaps left by the childhood experiences field and explore the role of nominally positive and negative significant transformations to children’s lives.

Using Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) nationally representative birth cohort data, I implement a change score (LCS) approach in a Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) estimation framework to investigate the impact of nominally adverse and advantageous critical life events on intra-individual change across five dimensions of social and emotional behaviours over time. The relative contributions of event effects for explaining inter-individual differences in intra-individual change over time compared to time-invariant markers of inequalities are discussed.

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