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Cohort Profile: The Woodlawn Study

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Abstract

The Woodlawn Study is an epidemiologically- defined community cohort study of 1242 Black Americans (51% female and 49% male), who were in first grade in 1966–67 in Woodlawn, a neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. The study comprises extensive interview data over the life course including self-, mother-, and/or teacher-reported assessments at ages 6, 16, 32, 42, and 62 (in progress), administrative records (i.e., education, crime, and death records), and census data. These data cover a wide range of focal areas across the life course, including family environment, socioeconomic indicators, education, social integration (e.g., marriage, community engagement, religious involvement) and social support, employment, racial discrimination, substance use, crime/victimization, and mental and physical health, including mortality. Over the past 50 years, Woodlawn research has mapped cumulative disadvantage, substance use, and criminal offending and has identified key risk and protective factors of adversity, resilience, and success across the full life course. In turn, these findings have informed life course theory and policy for a population that experiences significant criminal and health disparities.

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Notes

  1. The Woodlawn Mental Health Center was established to address the mental health needs of populations that were not traditionally addressed through clinical practice. Woodlawn was selected from several communities across 12 states because of its location near an academic institution and its strong community engagement, investment, and support of mental health services (see Kellam and Schiff, 1966; Kellam et al., 1972). This strong community activism stemmed in large part in response to the rapidly changing landscape of the Woodlawn community at the time.

  2. During the program’s third year, parent involvement was incorporated into the teacher-student classroom meetings (Schiff, 1972). The assessments for the 1966–67 cohort were also more extensive, including interviews with the mothers or mother surrogates for all of the first-grade students (Kellam et al., 1972) and more extensive follow-up assessments in third grade (Schiff, 1972).

  3. The research protocols for the age 32 (1992–93), age 42 (2002–03) assessments, and the criminal justice record retrieval (2012) were approved by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Institutional Review Board. The age 62 (2022) data collection effort was approved by the University of Maryland Institutional Review Board.

  4. We compared the non-incarcerated Woodlawn participants from each adult interview (n = 916 for young adulthood and n = 815 for midlife) with Black Americans aged 30–34 from the 1992–94 the National Household Survey of Drug Abuse (NHSDA) (U.S. DHHS, 1992) and Black Americans aged 35–49 from the 2003 National Survey of Drug Use in Households (U.S. DHHS, 2004).

  5. Based on the latest search of the National Death Index, which includes deaths through 2021 (modal age 61), 21% of the cohort members have died.

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Acknowledgements

The Woodlawn Study was designed and executed by Sheppard Kellam and Margaret Ensminger and predominately funded by several NIH institutes through the years. We are especially grateful to these original researchers, the Woodlawn Study participants, the Woodlawn Community Advisory Board, and all of the researchers who have been instrumental in creating and maintaining this rich data set.

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  1. Department of Behavioral and Community Health, University of Maryland, 1234 School of Public Health Building, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Elaine Eggleston Doherty & Kerry M. Green

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  1. Elaine Eggleston Doherty
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Correspondence to Elaine Eggleston Doherty.

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Table 6

Table 6 Description of measures for key domains
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Doherty, E.E., Green, K.M. Cohort Profile: The Woodlawn Study. J Dev Life Course Criminology 9, 531–554 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-023-00236-z

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