IOE Insights

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Voiceover 1
You're listening to IOE insights. The UCL Institute of Education podcast and University College London.

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Voiceover 2
This is Research for the Real World. Conversations about education and social science research and its impact on policy, practice and our everyday lives.

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Mark Quinn
This is Research for the Real World. Hello, I'm Mark Quinn and I am an associate professor and deputy program director for the Early career Teacher entitlement Programs here at the IOE. In this season of Research for the Real World, we're highlighting the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies and its role in developing powerful resources and evidence for research and policy development, and to inform and shape the world we live in today.

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Mark Quinn
So today, I'm really excited to have Dr Gergo Baranyi. Gergo is a senior research fellow at the Social Research Institute, and his research focuses on the life course impacts of physical and social environments on cognitive and mental health and on healthy aging. Have I got that right?

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes, exactly. Thank you very much for the introduction. I'm also very happy to be here.

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Mark Quinn
It's great to have you. So before joining UCL, Gergo was a research associate at the University of Edinburgh, where he worked on projects exploring how air pollution and air level deprivation across the life course associated with longevity, as well as cognitive, biological and brain aging. He completed his PhD. Well done on area level crime and mental health in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

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Mark Quinn
Has a wide range of international collaborations in cities such as Berlin, Barcelona and Budapest. All the Bs, I notice, were particularly interested today in how Gergo’s research explores the administrative and geospatial data linked to cohort study data. So welcome again to the podcast.

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Gergo Baranyi
Thank you.

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Mark Quinn
So just to get started, I would really just like to know, first of all about your journey through your career, how you came to study, what you're studying right now and what you got, what got you interested in this area of study?

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Gergo Baranyi
Yeah. So I started my studies back in Budapest. So I learned I studied psychology, and from the first time point, I was very interested to understand why some people develop mental health problems while other people don't. So I studied psychology, and later on I realized that, you know, different individual factors and maybe also societal factors which might be important, such as individuals living in particular areas are more likely to have mental health problems than others.

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Gergo Baranyi
And this led actually me to study public health, did my second degree in public health in Berlin and later doing a PhD in geography. So literally from the interest front on mental health and the distribution of mental health problems, I was starting to kind of understand how social factors also play a role in the etiology of mental health problems, and also like the environmental factors.

00:03:03:12 - 00:03:19:04
Gergo Baranyi
And then during my PhD in Edinburgh, I became very interested in the environmental determinants of mental health, and especially using longitudinal and cohort studies, which are basically studies of every measure at the same time, multiple the same thing multiple times.

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Mark Quinn
And why in particular, have you chosen to research, housing quality and the connection and the associations between that and outcomes in school for children?

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Gergo Baranyi
Yeah. So this is my very, most recent paper. So it's I'm generally interested in environment and environment when I'm talking about the environment. This is everything which is on one hand outside of our home but also inside of our home. So there's the physical kind of like characteristic of places where we live, but also somewhat social characteristics. So who we are living with, houses or neighborhood and so on.

00:03:51:12 - 00:04:09:18
Gergo Baranyi
So I had this interest literally since the beginning of my PhD, and in the last few years I was mainly focusing on the environment which is outside of our home neighborhood. And most recently I started to focus also on housing conditions. And one of the reason I focus on housing conditions and educational outcomes is because there is very little research on it.

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Gergo Baranyi
So obviously there is some research on linking overcrowding, for example, to educational attainment. So how good, for example, the grades of kids or but very little research on linking this to other educational outcomes such as for example, missing school and school absence. And this really tracked my interest to trying to understand that. Or we can also link other housing conditions, such as, for example, dump living in particular type of flats, having access to a garden.

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Gergo Baranyi
But we can link also these other physical characteristics of the homes we are living to educational outcomes. And not just grades in schools, but also to missing school in general.

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Mark Quinn
So so thinking about those different housing conditions, what are the what have you found so far to be the strongest associations between those conditions and outcomes for children?

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Gergo Baranyi
Yeah. So what we did we used six different indicators of of housing quality. And out of the six the most important ones looked like was damp and mold, the homes and overcrowding. I have to say that these were all measured by asking the parents whether there was any damp and mold in the home, and they had to indicate that yes or not.

00:05:21:09 - 00:05:42:09
Gergo Baranyi
And if yes, whether it is a small problem or a great problem. So it is all self-reported measure by the parents. And yes, I would really say that overcrowding and damp for two main characteristics which were associated with education outcomes. We also find some associations with having a central heating or not, and whether somebody lives in a flat or a house.

00:05:42:11 - 00:05:46:11
Gergo Baranyi
But it was really like damp and overcrowding. The two main characteristics.

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Mark Quinn
And how significant are those associations or the impacts that you think you found?

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Gergo Baranyi
There were actually surprisingly large associations. So first we created a scale using these six different indicators of housing quality and we said that those individuals who reported to have negative housing conditions in at least two dimensions, they were considered as having the lower quality housing as opposed to having higher quality housing. And among those, they were living in a lower quality housing.

00:06:16:06 - 00:06:30:08
Gergo Baranyi
We find that kids missed, on average, more than 15 days of school across compulsory education. Their education is 11 years. So I would say this is quite substantial, especially if you compare how many days they usually miss on average.

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Mark Quinn
I see, so it's 15 days. It's about three weeks of schooling, but it's three weeks on top of the other. The other missing days they might have. Right?

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes. So we also take into consideration socioeconomic status and the educational level and so on. So this is really in addition to all of these factors.

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Mark Quinn
So these are additional factors affecting the absence of the child from from school. And what age is the child when you're measuring this.

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Gergo Baranyi
So we had information on missing ness throughout the whole compulsory education and housing qualities were measured at age seven. So around the around the beginning of compulsory education okay.

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Mark Quinn
And you were using the Millennium Cohort Study for this and the National Pupil Database for this as well. We do you want to say something about how you know the value of those two databases and how you were able to use both of them together.

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Gergo Baranyi
So I'm based at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, and we are hosting a series of amazing nationally representative cohort studies. And one of them is the Millennium Cohort Study. So basically this is a study of approximately 20,000 children. They were born around 2000, 2002. And they have been followed up ever since regularly. So the first data collection, this took place when they were nine months old.

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Gergo Baranyi
And then the next one at age three, five, seven, 11, 14, 17. So it's fair like your own and there's a large amount of information collected from these kids. We also know, for example, on the addresses where they are living. So we're able to link it to environmental information. And in addition to that, certain time points, parents were asked whether they would agree, although they would consent that administrative information can be linked to the cohort.

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Gergo Baranyi
So I think at age seven, the parents were asked whether they agreed to link the kids educational records to the study and the educational records, in this case, our National Pupil Database, which is collected by the Department of Education.

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Mark Quinn
Yeah, and that's another huge database which you you spend a lot of time looking at.

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes, absolutely. And, and really what makes this study really great that we were able to do the linkage between survey data and administrative data, which is not often the case.

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Gergo Baranyi
So housing is a factor in pupil outcomes and pupil people attendance and pupil outcomes, which I think you were able to to demonstrate in the research. But I guess it's I guess it's an argument that it may be, is it a causal factor, do you think or do you think it's an associated factor. How strong do you think is that linkage or are you able to say.

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Gergo Baranyi
Yeah. So I would like to say first of all that this is observational data. What we used here, not an experimental data, which means that it's really hard to draw any causal inference for data. So therefore I would really just describe associations and correlations here.

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Mark Quinn
And there are other socioeconomic disadvantage factors which you would also see present. Yeah.

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. So basically what we do in this kind of research, we control for a lot of socioeconomic factors. And actually we saw that often we control for income educational attainment of the parents. The association between housing conditions and educational attainment or absence reduces. So we see that actually socioeconomic status of the parents explains some of these variation.

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Gergo Baranyi
But still often this find some significant associations, as we discussed, quite substantial.

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Mark Quinn
So good to go. You've been telling us about different environmental factors and the relative associations between those and impacts you've seen. Can you draw a connection for us between those different factors and what you see in the Millennium Cohort Study?

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Gergo Baranyi
Data itself, as I mentioned before, in the built in social environment, was associated with mental health of children. And the basically what we did in terms of data linked the home addresses of these kids, together with environmental data across 20 years time. And in terms of linkage, we used two different methods. I mean, first, you know, for each address in what geographic area it is.

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Gergo Baranyi
So there are different geographies in the UK. And based on those geographies, you are able to link external data to the cohort. So for example, that is the index of multiple deprivation in each of the countries of the UK. And these indices they provide information on small geographic areas such as and so it is lower output areas. And by 58 we basically link these information together to the cohort.

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Gergo Baranyi
So this is one way how we did the linkage. The other way was we have the coordinates for these addresses which is like an extent ipso coordinates. So you can look at a place on the Earth's surface using these coordinates. And so we have the coordinates in one hand and other hand. We have layers of maps. And we are able to link these together.

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Gergo Baranyi
So for example for air pollution we had air pollution maps covering the whole of the UK. We were linking together these maps to the cohort members location. And because usually people are not just like sitting in their homes. No.

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Mark Quinn
Did they move? They, they, they live with one place, maybe go to school in another. Oh, they move house. Of course.

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes, absolutely. And this is one of the complications when we are using this geographic type of data. So what we can do and what we also try to do in this study is we were drawing buffers around the residential homes. So for example you can draw a 300 meter buffer is which is approximately five minutes walk. Or you can draw a larger buffer, you know, 500 meter, 1000 meter buffer.

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Gergo Baranyi
And we computed the average exposure within those buffers.

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Mark Quinn
Okay.

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Gergo Baranyi
And then these buffers were the link.

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Mark Quinn
To the cohort. And is the assumption within that buffer. That's where the young person will be living and playing and going to school.

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Gergo Baranyi
This is exactly the assumption. And at the same time we know this is not hundred percent true because very likely people are going outside of their buffers or people are just going, I don't know, on the on the particular directions all the time and not in the other direction.

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Mark Quinn
Maybe in particular, particularly the more socially advantaged they are.

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Gergo Baranyi
Yeah. So there are also individual differences. So we know that. So we know that the mobility of individuals differs very much based on age, whether they are male and female or what kind of jobs they have. So we know that this all differs. So we still kind of have to capture the potential area of exposure. And what we do is usually usually using buffers, which we know are not the best way to do it, but it's really hard to put the GPS on every participant in a cohort to derive the exact exposure to ethical.

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Mark Quinn
And I guess if you're talking about environment, the environment itself changes in the geography. Perhaps not largely or maybe not fast, I'm not sure. But if you're talking about pollution, pollution levels are not the same throughout the 17 year period of the of this particular cohort.

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes, absolutely. So that's why it was important for us to have annual or on every five years these environmental exposures measure. So for example, for air pollution, we had air pollution maps for every year. And we were linking these air pollution maps using buffers to the addresses where these kids were living for green space, for example, you know, as green space is not changing that fast.

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Gergo Baranyi
For that. We had green space measures in every few years. So yes, depending on how fast this environmental characteristics might change, they might need different repeatedly measured environmental data. So for air pollution more frequent ones I need it.

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Mark Quinn
Yeah. And we talked at the beginning about administrative and survey data. Can you just explain to our listeners what the differences between these two types are?

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes, absolutely. So survey data is when researchers or agencies which are working for researchers go to people and ask particular questions from them. This is survey data. Here. The participants actively decided, okay, I want to participate in this data collection. And then if it's a longitudinal data collection, then they are asked in every few years time, I want to still be part of this data collection.

00:14:23:02 - 00:14:51:03
Gergo Baranyi
And they provide data. And every few years and at one point they can see that, well, I'm not interested anymore to be in this cohort. Or they can, I know, leave the area and move somewhere else. And, and the cohort managers are not able to reach them anymore. So this is kind of like one of the limitations of survey data that people might be not traceable after the amount of time on the other side, administrative data is basically data which is routinely collected in different government organizations or by or by private companies.

00:14:51:05 - 00:15:16:20
Gergo Baranyi
So, for example, the administrative data, what we used in the study on housing conditions and educational outcomes comes from Department for education and Is data is based on all state maintained schools. And the schools have to report and every certain intervals, intervals. How many of their children are missing school. And they also have to report information on on the children's attainment or exam scores.

00:15:16:20 - 00:15:30:02
Gergo Baranyi
And this administrative data is therefore much more complete than a survey data. It is also not based on whether people consent to be part of it or not, but it is based on what the government is able to collect.

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Mark Quinn
According to the unique pupil number.

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Gergo Baranyi
The municipal numbers exactly. Similarly, it works, for example, with NHS data as well. So if you have hospital episode statistics which can be linked to cohorts, and again, if somebody comes in to interaction with NHS or with any other health care providers which are covered by NHS, then this information will be available by NHS digital and we will be able to link this to the cohort.

00:15:54:19 - 00:16:17:03
Gergo Baranyi
So as you see, this administrative data has an almost universal coverage. However, there are also some biases in this data, such as for example, kids, they are not going to state maintained schools, for example going to private schools or they are homeschooled. They are not captured in this data set. So this is a certain limitation. What they have to consider when they are using this type of information.

00:16:17:03 - 00:16:40:11
Gergo Baranyi
It's very similar with hospital episode statistics. So with health data, if individuals don't go to NHS hospitals or to private hospitals, this will be not captured there. However, still, this information still provides us much wider and almost universal coverage. So when we link together survey data with administrative data, we are able to capitalize on the advantages of of of both of these type of data.

00:16:40:13 - 00:17:03:21
Gergo Baranyi
So survey data, we have a huge amount of information that we collect from the survey participants. We ask them about their opinion about particular topics. We ask them how they feel on a certain day. We ask them about their socioeconomic status, about their childhood, and so on. So there's a real wealth of information here on one hand. On the other hand, we have this administrative data which provides an almost universal coverage in certain areas.

00:17:03:23 - 00:17:23:17
Gergo Baranyi
However, the data there is not that detailed info. We don't have information on on their parents socioeconomic status. We don't need to have information on on that mental health based on symptom scales or something like that. So then we combine these two different types of information. We can try to get the best from both of these different words.

00:17:23:19 - 00:17:45:14
Mark Quinn
It's in I think in your research you mentioned that in England. In any case, in England about 1 in 7 households are living in accommodation which is below a basic quality. Is it. Do you find that children are more likely to be living in poor, poor quality housing, or or less likely to be living in poor quality housing?

00:17:45:18 - 00:17:49:11
Mark Quinn
What's are children particularly affected by poor quality housing?

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Gergo Baranyi
Yes. So you refer to the own decent housing standards, which is set by the government. And what we see assume that, yes, children are more likely to live in homes which are below on this, decent housing standard. One of the factors which is measured often there is overcrowding and obviously when there are children at home, they are more likely overcrowded.

00:18:08:15 - 00:18:09:17
Gergo Baranyi
Those homes, yes.

00:18:09:17 - 00:18:12:15
Gergo Baranyi
Than in compared to when they don't have children.

00:18:12:17 - 00:18:29:22
Mark Quinn
If they're just simply more children in the home. Yes, than there are. But I suppose this also means that your research has urgency and resonance for public policy, right? Because if children are more likely to be suffering for the effects of poor housing, something should be done about it.

00:18:29:24 - 00:18:54:07
Gergo Baranyi
Yes, absolutely. And I would say that our research came in a very great time point, because just in October this year, or like few weeks ago, there was a new policy introduced about slow, which basically forced social landlords to fix, but to investigate and fix any hazardous housing related issues within a certain time frame. It was really kind of like draw up to fix any damp and mold related issues.

00:18:54:09 - 00:19:05:10
Gergo Baranyi
So you might recall it a few years ago, there was this case and a two year old boy up nine because of serious mold issues. So I think it's really kind of like resonates this research with this new policy change.

00:19:05:10 - 00:19:25:12
Mark Quinn
So thank you for that. Go to Google I might just pivot. Now back to the another area that you've been looking at related area obviously, which is associations between environmental exposures and mental health in adolescents. So just in a nutshell, can you summarize what you've been finding with that piece of research?

00:19:25:15 - 00:19:46:12
Gergo Baranyi
Yes. So you used actually the exact same datasets, the Millennium Cohort study. And we were very much interested to try to have longitudinal information on environmental data. And I'm seeing environmental data focused, for example, on built environments such as access to green space, blue space, battered areas built up or not built up of walkable areas, and so on.

00:19:46:15 - 00:20:10:06
Gergo Baranyi
We also focused on social environment, which includes area deprivation, crime, and also in the chemical physical environment, which includes air pollution mainly. And what really this study was trying to do, they were trying to identify specific ages during these kids early life course, where the impact of these, environmental exposures might have a long lasting effect on mental health.

00:20:10:08 - 00:20:35:10
Gergo Baranyi
And for this, we really need 20 years of longitudinal data on exposure. So on these different environmental factors and or outcomes, mental health was measured at age 17. And the measured methods also come in two different ways. Children were absolutely have ever been diagnosed with serious anxiety or depression. And they also use a symptom scale to assess whether they have any common mental disorders.

00:20:35:12 - 00:20:45:04
Mark Quinn
And did you find a particularly strong association between one environmental factor and mental health in in adolescents at 17.

00:20:45:06 - 00:20:45:11
Gergo Baranyi
Yes.

00:20:45:11 - 00:20:47:01
Gergo Baranyi
So some of those factors.

00:20:47:04 - 00:21:08:08
Gergo Baranyi
Yes. Absolutely. So basically what we find that, social in the entire environment in childhood and adolescence is associated with mental health problems. And I think it's important to stress that social and built environment together. As I mentioned, we use a lot of different environmental exposures. The reason for that is that we know that environmental exposures are highly correlated with each other.

00:21:08:10 - 00:21:29:22
Gergo Baranyi
So for example, in areas where there is more green space, there would be very likely less built up or concrete. Similarly, in areas where there is high green space, there is more likely less air pollution or even there is high air pollution that might do also higher noise. So somehow these environmental exposures, they are strongly associated because they have a common source, for example, for air pollution and noise.

00:21:29:22 - 00:21:58:20
Gergo Baranyi
We know that a common source is traffic very often, or because they are all relating to social or structural disadvantage in the area. In more deprived areas, it's likely higher noise, higher air pollution and, lower quality green spaces. So therefore, it was important for us to also try to understand how they, in combination might affect mental health, not just focusing on one particular exposure, because it's also very hard using observational data to separate the impact of all of these exposures.

00:21:59:00 - 00:22:07:02
Mark Quinn
And is there more research in this area that that you'll be conducting within the center, or that you are inviting others to conduct in the same field?

00:22:07:04 - 00:22:33:06
Gergo Baranyi
Yes, absolutely. So we have few more studies ongoing at the moment, but only one of them is specifically focusing on neurodevelopmental outcomes such as autism and ADHD. We are trying to understand that we can identify any environmental factors again from birth upon adolescence, which might be related to ADHD or autism. There's one of the study we are working on, and also recently we finished an other study on air pollution and general health among children.

00:22:33:06 - 00:22:43:11
Gergo Baranyi
Very specifically, we're trying to understand whether there are any sensitive periods during the first 17 years that exposure to air pollution might have a stronger effect on half of these children.

00:22:43:13 - 00:22:45:04
Gergo Baranyi
And have we found,

00:22:45:06 - 00:23:13:02
Gergo Baranyi
Interestingly, find actually that air pollution exposure between age three and six had a stronger effect on general have not approached outside of this sensitive indoor, which might be related to the fact that several organ systems are developing during this time. So there are morphological and functional changes undergoing in children and if they are exposed to toxic air pollution levels during the time, that might have a stronger and long lasting impact on their health and well-being.

00:23:13:04 - 00:23:34:14
Mark Quinn
And obviously, this is a huge study. The Millennium Cohort Study in these children live all over England and Scotland and Wales, and they live in urban areas and they live in rural areas. Are you finding a difference between the nations of Britain and are you finding a difference, an urban rural distinction in your data things.

00:23:34:15 - 00:23:56:08
Gergo Baranyi
This is this is a very important point of what you just mentioned, that work study covers the whole of the UK on one hand and the other hand it is it covers also urban and rural areas because very often in in research on environment and health, they are focusing on urban samples front. And we know that environmental exposures in urban areas are very different than in rural areas.

00:23:56:09 - 00:24:21:13
Gergo Baranyi
So that's why using the cohort study and other nationally representative studies, it's crucially important if you want to understand the relationship between environment, environmental and health, and how different environments and how different areas can modify the impact of environmental exposures. One half so we didn't do any studies specifically exploring the difference between England, Scotland, Wales and so on.

00:24:21:15 - 00:24:47:06
Gergo Baranyi
However, in one of our study, we focused on trying to understand better the impact of specific environmental exposures differ in urban versus in rural areas. And it was very interesting to see that it does so living, for example, in rural areas where the built environment is very low quality. For example, there are no access to greenspace when in rural areas, which have particularly high crime.

00:24:47:06 - 00:24:56:04
Gergo Baranyi
For example, deprivation had a stronger impact on mental health than the same level of deprivation or same level of greenspace in urban areas.

00:24:56:04 - 00:25:06:12
Mark Quinn
So just let me ask that again. So that's, to me, counterintuitive. As you said, in the rural areas, the access to green spaces might be lower. So digital I hear.

00:25:06:14 - 00:25:25:02
Gergo Baranyi
Very important here. I'm not saying that the exposure is different. I'm just saying that if you are keeping the exposure at the same level overall, then the effect is basically larger. We know that in rural areas, percentage of greenspace coverage is much higher than in urban areas. So you know it very clearly. It is really that the situation differs.

00:25:25:02 - 00:25:26:01
Mark Quinn
Yes, yes.

00:25:26:01 - 00:25:43:12
Gergo Baranyi
She's very interesting. So we know it. Also urban areas are less deprived. There's less crime there. And in rural areas also they have more green space still in those specific rural areas which have less green space or they are more deprived. The situation with mental health problems were much stronger.

00:25:43:12 - 00:26:08:23
Gergo Baranyi
Yes. And so although crime might be lower in some rural areas where it exists or whether the individual is exposed to it, it may have a larger effect. Okay. And of course, that suggests that there's a huge policy implications, social policy implication for this kind of study. Right. So we know more about the differential effects of the built environment and the environment generally.

00:26:09:00 - 00:26:27:19
Mark Quinn
And there are differences Rurally. And in urban areas that has implications for how government works and how funding happens. And and are you allowed to send any messages out to policy makers in this? You know, which policy makers do you feel should be reading your research group?

00:26:27:21 - 00:26:46:22
Gergo Baranyi
So I think the government recently put quite a lot of emphasis on coastal communities, communities, for example, which are not necessarily like large cities, but generally coastal communities. And they have, you know, that living close to blue space for a lot of international research is good for health and mental health, especially here and here in England. It's not necessarily a case.

00:26:46:22 - 00:27:16:03
Gergo Baranyi
We are seeing that in coastal communities, the mental health of young people is actually much worse than in non coastal communities with the same deprivation. And the government has already realized that there is this difference. So I think it's very important to try to understand why is this the case. So why is deprivation, you know coastal community or general deprivation in, you know, more rural or community more damaging for health and well-being than in a comparable inland or in a comparable urban community?

00:27:16:05 - 00:27:38:09
Gergo Baranyi
So I think on one hand, we have a lot of work needed to understand why is there this difference potentially, as the government is also doing, we need more support for these communities to tackle, for example, young adults, mental health problems and so on. We also know that in coastal communities, the incidence of suicide is much higher, for example, than in communities.

00:27:38:11 - 00:27:43:01
Gergo Baranyi
So we see that there are certain health problems and they need to be tackled and understood why.

00:27:43:03 - 00:28:26:10
Mark Quinn
It is so. So some listeners to the podcast, they are in schools, are running schools or teaching in schools, or they're working in local authorities or for housing associations. There are people who are maybe not making policy, but they are enacting policy across the country, in those rural areas and in those urban areas. And is there anything, anything practical that they could be doing differently either to address because we talked about mental health, as well as learning outcomes and absence in schools, for example, is there anything that you feel that people working in those areas could do to make a difference for those adolescents and young people?

00:28:26:12 - 00:28:57:10
Gergo Baranyi
So I would just go back to the story about housing conditions and school of sense. So as I mentioned, there is this law which just came into force, few weeks ago. I think enforcing it will be very important. And as I understand it, this law is first applicable for social landlords. So potentially extending it to private landlords would be very important given that there is already a wealth of evidence suggesting the link between a damp and mold and children's health and know or study also shows that there is no association with educational outcomes.

00:28:57:10 - 00:29:20:13
Gergo Baranyi
So I think it would be very important to note that the law is in place to enforce it appropriately from the Council, and also if, for example, if parents, they see that there is an issue with mold and damp in their haunted, they should actually report it to that. If it's a social housing, they should report it to their social landlord or they try to fix it based on other because it has a long term impact on child health and education outcomes.

00:29:20:15 - 00:29:51:03
Mark Quinn
Yeah. I was saying to you before we started the recording category that my work is in with early career teachers and I can imagine that there's, you know, those teachers listening to this podcast. You might also be thinking if they've got a young person, the child in their class who's perhaps absent, or there's, a kind of pattern of absence, it might well be down to the place that they live, and it might not be the family that might be a very supportive family, of course, but it could simply be the conditions that they're living in, not simply but connected to the conditions that they live in.

00:29:51:03 - 00:29:57:11
Mark Quinn
And it's just helpful to know that, isn't it? If you are a teacher working in schools and to be aware of that possibility.

00:29:57:13 - 00:30:14:14
Gergo Baranyi
Yes, absolutely. We really find that association between having mold and home voice particularly strong with authorize school absences, which is related to medical appointments related to just being sick and staying at home. So in so we know that in this case, the association was particularly strong with this kind of absence in school.

00:30:14:14 - 00:30:26:06
Gergo Baranyi
Yeah. So it sounds like there's lots of questions there still haven't been answered by the end of the work you've done so far. Good, good. What's the next thing for you. What what are you working on now? What would you hope to work on.

00:30:26:06 - 00:30:50:06
Gergo Baranyi
Next so long term? I'm very interested to find out that you mentioned that there are sensitive periods during development when exposure to different environmental characteristics might be a very long term effect on our health and wellbeing. So I will also continue this research in the next few years, hopefully, and focusing on different health outcomes, not just on other developmental disorders, but also on other mental have outcomes and so on.

00:30:50:09 - 00:31:10:00
Gergo Baranyi
And potentially using not just the Millennium Cohort study, but other studies we are hosting in our center, because we have also studies where the participants are rising or in older age. So it could be very interesting to see whether if they have exposed to environment, the specific environmental characteristics in their young age is still an impact on their health, like 50 years later.

00:31:10:02 - 00:31:30:17
Gergo Baranyi
I'm asking these specific questions because back in Scotland, we were very fortunate to use a few data sets where the people were born. In 1936 and we were able to link, for example, air pollution during those during the first few years to the addresses where these people were living. And we found that people were dying a few years earlier.

00:31:30:17 - 00:31:42:11
Gergo Baranyi
If they were born in an area with higher air pollution level. So we see that there might be an extremely long term association between air pollution exposure and lung activity and health in late adulthood.

00:31:42:13 - 00:32:09:17
Mark Quinn
Well, it's clear that you are a real advocate for longitudinal study, for cohort studies in general, and I can well see. Thanks Gergo for coming in for speaking to us today. It's been really fascinating actually to to listen to has been lovely meeting you and talking to you. And I've been particularly interested actually in all the implications that this has for social policy, for people actually working in frontline, in schools or in housing or as landlords and that kind of work.

00:32:09:17 - 00:32:16:02
Mark Quinn
I think there's strong messages for, for them and what you say in your research. So thank you for that and thanks for doing the podcast.

00:32:16:04 - 00:32:18:10
Gergo Baranyi
Thank you very much for the opportunity. Being here.

00:32:18:12 - 00:32:43:24
Mark Quinn
You've just heard from Dr Gergo Baranyi. Some of what we've covered today is also available in the episode notes. If you've enjoyed this episode, we have an archive of 25 past seasons. Just search IOE Insights to find episodes of research for the Real World, as well as more podcasts from the IOE. Regular listeners of the IOE Insights podcast might also be thinking hang on.

00:32:44:01 - 00:33:05:10
Mark Quinn
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00:33:05:16 - 00:33:25:00
Mark Quinn
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00:33:47:23 - 00:33:52:01
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