The ELFE Study (French Longitudinal Study of Children): behind the scenes for the designing of this survey of teenagers

It all began in the 2000s with a project imagined and promoted by the demographer Henri Leridon, then head of a mixed research unit regrouping INED and INSERM researchers (INSERM: French Health and Medical Research Institute). The aim was to follow 20,000 children from birth to adulthood using a multidisciplinary approach that allows for analyzing a range of different aspects of a child’s life. 

Alongside the project, Santé-Publique France was assigned to conduct a study on the children’s environment and health, as part of the National Health and Environment Plan which launched in 2004. The aim of that plan is to assess the health effects on children of exposure to certain types of pollution. 

Since the two projects had about the same goal (i.e., enabling children today to grow up in better conditions than before), it appeared that bringing them together would be beneficial for the different teams. That’s how the Elfe Study was “born,” in 2011 (www.elfe-france.fr). 

The particularity of the study is that it’s the very first French nationwide longitudinal cohort study (https://www.ined.fr/fr/lexique/cohort) to cover the various aspects of children’s lives simultaneously. The three major disciplines applied in conducting research studies for this project The social sciences, health, and the environment are. 

With that new survey we gave the children, now teenagers, a chance to speak up. It seemed important to us to allow them to participate fully in this new information-gathering stage. 

For the practical side, we contacted the children’s parents in the fall, after which a personal letter was sent to children whose parents had consented to have them participate. The survey covered many subjects, and the teens could fill it out at their own pace, on line, using a technical support of their own choosing. The questionnaires were designed to make the experience of filling them out a pleasant one, while also considering accessibility norms. And they contained a few surprises pour the teenagers! 

During this follow-up stage, the Elfe Study questioned its young people on previously raised topics and new ones, the aim being to track changes related to adolescence and/or society. Eating, environmental questions, friendships and romantic or love relationships, family life, and, in the school framework, sports and wellbeing, as well as the teen respondent’s personality—all these subjects were taken up in the questionnaires. 

The “apprentice-researcher” program was set up by the Arbre des Connaissances [Tree of knowledge] association to give middle and high school students a prolonged firsthand and hands-on experience of the world of research. How? Through an immersion in a research laboratory or unit over a series of sessions scheduled throughout the school year.

For our part, the Elfe research team hosted a pair of students from the Miriam Makeba Middle School in Aubervilliers [where INED is located] and another pair from the Hélène Boucher High School in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris. During the sessions, these young people tested questionnaires and commented for us on several aspects of them: design and illustrations, ability to understand the questions (accessibility), question length, and a range of others. This in turn enabled us to improve them. For example, the students suggested a change in the response options of a question on the how often they sometimes arrived late to class. Among the possible responses had been “3 to 5 times a week” and “every day”— a redundancy in that a school week lasts 5 days.

Having the views of these apprentice-researchers is precious for us when it comes to designing communication tools adapted to teenagers. In this connection, the apprentice-researchers suggested producing a flyer to motivate cohort teens to take the new survey. We then integrated the flyer into the set of survey documents sent out to the families. “Participatory research” is no empty term!