E-Risk@30

The Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study is one of the most ambitious cohort studies of child and adolescent development in the UK. It began with 2,232 same-sex twins born in England and Wales in 1994 and 1995, and has followed them through childhood and adolescence with a series of detailed face-to-face assessments, tracking mental and physical health, social experiences, poverty, educational attainment, social media use, victimisation and support, and biological data including genetics, and linking to neighbourhood-level data on air pollution and crime. Now, as these twins turn thirty, the study is conducting a new follow-up wave: E-Risk@30.

The twenties are both the peak age for onset of mental health issues and the period in which people traditionally become fully independent.

The Study

The E-Risk study's value lies in two features that distinguish it from other British cohort studies. First, it represents the full socioeconomic spectrum of UK families and has retained 93% of its original participants through to age 18, making its findings broadly generalisable to young adults in the UK. Second, the twin design allows researchers to compare mental health outcomes within pairs of twins who had different social experiences controlling for shared family environment and, in the case of identical twins, genetic factors. This approach gets closer to understanding what actually causes mental health outcomes rather than what merely correlates with them.

The age-30 wave adds new dimensions to this long-running dataset. Follow-up will involve remote assessments via Zoom, smartphone-based data collection, saliva and blood samples, and linkage to medical, benefit, education, and crime records. The timing is deliberate: the combination of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and wider economic instability has created unprecedented uncertainty for young adults now in their late twenties. Assessing the cohort at this point allows researchers to capture what shaped different outcomes across this period, and to identify what might support the most vulnerable young adults to thrive.

My Involvement

I am involved in the E-Risk@30 study as a member of an advisory group, contributing a young person's perspective to the design and conduct of the new data collection wave. This includes reviewing assessment materials, considering the ethical dimensions of the data being collected, and helping ensure that the study's questions and methods are responsive to the realities of young adults' lives in the mid-2020s.