# Effects of Childhood Health on Schooling, Work, and the Transition into Adulthood

> **NIH NIH P01** · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR · 2020 · $205,157

## Abstract

Effects of Childhood Health on Schooling, Work, and the Transition into Adulthood
 This project will address an important unresolved question that is central to understanding the emergence
of health and socioeconomic disparities early in the life course: to what extent does poor health in childhood
and adolescence impede a successful transition to adulthood? To date, there is a well-developed body of liter-
ature which shows that children in poor health perform less well in school in terms of grades and on standard-
ized tests. Despite these clear associations, firmly establishing the causal effects of health on education has
been elusive due to unobserved factors that shape both health and education, and because the relationship is
potentially recursive and bi-directional. Consequently, it is unclear whether health conditions exert a causal
longer-term effect on socioeconomic transitions in young adulthood that shape ultimate socioeconomic attain-
ment later in the adult lifecourse. Moreover, most studies use either a global measure of health or focus on a
single health condition (often measured only at one time point), and so our understanding of the dimensions of
health that are most consequential for human capital development is limited. This study will build on the nas-
cent literature and improve upon existing research by investigating more thoroughly and conclusively how
childhood health trajectories, from birth through childhood and adolescence, shape the contours of the con-
temporary transition to adulthood. The study will develop and use new data from the Transition into Adulthood
Supplement (TAS) to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). TAS follows children from PSID families
into young adulthood. Most of these children participated in the PSID Child Development Supplement (CDS)
and many participated in previous waves of the TAS that were fielded between 2005 and 2015. In this Program
Project, we will be selecting an expanded sample comprised of all young adults in PSID families and substan-
tially revising the TAS questionnaire and fielding two rounds of the TAS in 2017 and 2019. As part of this Re-
search Project, we will design a new retrospective childhood health module that will ascertain health conditions
across childhood and adolescence; this module will complement, and be used in conjunction with, existing pro-
spective measures of childhood health from CDS. In addition, we will collaborate with Research Project 1 to
collect vital statistics birth records on sample members that will allow us and other researchers to construct
measures of pre-natal health. We will employ innovative new statistical methods that will position us to make
the most convincing estimates of causal relationships that are possible with observational data. With unparal-
leled longitudinal data on health across the early life course, our project will examine how childhood health is
linked with educational attainment, gainful employment, residential/f...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9938655
- **Project number:** 5P01HD087155-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
- **Principal Investigator:** Robert Bozick
- **Activity code:** P01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $205,157
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** — → 2022-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9938655

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9938655, Effects of Childhood Health on Schooling, Work, and the Transition into Adulthood (5P01HD087155-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9938655. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*