The Woodlawn mental health studies: tracking children and families for long-term follow-up.

Elementary school children in a large public urban school system (Chicago) can be tracked into adolescence, together with their families, by using student numbers established by the Chicago Public Schools. This paper reports on the linkage between a psychiatric follow-up study and the data bank of the Chicago Public Schools. The authors were able to find information about the location and grade placement of 87% of an urban ghetto neighborhood's first grade children after a seven to ten-year lapse in contact. The children about whom information was found did not differ from those missing in the early measures of their school achievement and psychological wellbeing. However, first grade measures of school success of failure did relate to grade placement of children ten years later, as did first grade ratings of bizarreness.