A team of researchers at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex has been awarded funding to carry out the most comprehensive study of its kind on breastfeeding.
The £240,000 project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will examine the effects of breastfeeding not just on children, but also on mothers and employers.
Led by a team of researchers at ISER including Emilia Del Bono, Maria Iacovou and Birgitta Rabe, with the collaboration of Almudena Sevilla-Sanz at Oxford, the research will explore the relationship between breastfeeding and a child's early development including early literacy and numeracy skills at Key Stages 1 and 2. It will also examine whether there are links between breastfeeding and a child's social development by examining areas such as hyperactivity and peer problems.
The study will look to see if there is any link between breastfeeding and the health of mothers, for example in areas such as post natal depression. It will also explore the impact of family-friendly working practices on breastfeeding duration and the mothers' decisions to return to work.
Using two major data sets involving some 15,000 children each, the ISER team believes this will be the most comprehensive and one of the most ambitious pieces of research ever undertaken into the effects of breastfeeding. The analysis will be conducted using a range of economic and statistical techniques apt to disentangle the true effect of breastfeeding from other spurious associations.