The first Dunedin baby to enter the University of Otago’s Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health & Development Study was born on 1 April 1972 and over the course of the following year a further 1,037 babies became Study members.
Since then, the cohort has been assessed regularly and, most recently, when Study members were aged 45, 94.1 per cent of living members participated, making it the highest follow-up rate for a study of this design and duration, in the world.....
Over the past 50 years, Dunedin Study researchers have published more than 1,400 peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and reports on many aspects of human health and development including, but not limited to, behavioural, oral health, and respiratory domains.
Some of these significant contributions were recently recognised as among the most important for psychology and social science in the last 100 years, as acknowledged in the Science News 2021 ‘Century of Science’....
“The Dunedin Study tracked offending and found that very few teenagers went on to be regulars in the adult criminal courts, but the majority of teens just tried lawbreaking once or twice and grew up to be law-abiding citizens,” Professor Moffitt says....
“These data were unique worldwide, and the Dunedin Study has by now influenced juvenile justice policy in most developed nations. We’ve won awards for improving the lives of children in conflict with the law around the world.”...
Looking ahead the Study plans to examine the developmental origins of social cohesion, as indicated by people’s socially cohesive attitudes and behaviours. Recent research due to be published soon has identified several antecedents of vaccine acceptance behaviour in adults.
