Story Details

Exploring patterns of offending over the life-course and examining risk and protective factors associated with offending careers is dependent on having high quality longitudinal data. However, establishing longitudinal studies of offending have been problematic due to their expense, low sample numbers, high rates of attrition and a bias towards males from low income areas. Linking population-wide cohorts of administrative data from 13 Queensland Government databases across health (mental health data, emergency and hospital admissions, trauma data, perinatal data and deaths data), justice (police cautions and conferences for youths, adult and youth court finalisations, adult and youth orders and detention/prison data), child protection (child maltreatment victimisations and perpetrations), births (births into the cohort and births from parents in the cohort), deaths and marriages. Data will be available for approximately 190,000 individuals (50.8% male; 4.6% Indigenous Australian) and will include more than 2000 variables. This is a collaborative project involving Queensland Government Agencies. The QLD Record Linkage Group based within QLD Health will manage the health data application, linkage and delivery process for the project.