Cohort Profile: West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study: Health in the Community

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Abstract
The West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study (Twenty-07 for short) was set up in 1986 by Sally Macintyre, Patrick West, Ellen Annandale, Kate Hunt, Graeme Ford, Rex Taylor, Sheila MacIver, Russell Ecob and Rory Williams at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Medical Sociology Unit, Glasgow (now the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit).1 The aim of the Twenty-07 Study is to investigate, longitudinally, the social processes producing or maintaining inequalities in health by six key social positions: social class (defined, as was traditional at the time, as the main occupation of the head of household), gender, age, area of residence, marital status (now broadened to encompass family structure) and, in collaboration with other Unit programmes, ethnicity. Figure 1 illustrates the basic design of the study—it involves three cohorts 20 years apart—born around 1932 (dotted line), 1952 (dashed line) and 1972 (gray line)—with a planned follow-up period of 20 years, to provide information on 60 years of the life course.