Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) is the national longitudinal study of children and young people in the Republic of Ireland and has followed two cohorts for over ten years to date: Cohort ’98 who were recruited into the study at age nine years and Cohort ’08, recruited at age nine months. The study aims to describe the lives of Irish children and young people in terms of their development, with a view to positively affecting policies and services available for them. Traditionally, data collection involved in-home visits from an interviewer who conducted face-to-face interviews, recorded physical measurements of study participants and administered cognitive assessments. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions, significant adaptations were required to these methods to ensure data collection for the pilot and main fieldwork for Cohort ’08 at age 13 could continue to the expected timeline. Face-to-face interviews with participants were replaced with telephone and web-based modes, interviewer training was conducted online, online resources were made available for interviewers and participants and COVID-19 related items were added to questionnaires. In addition to the scheduled data collection, a special COVID-19 survey was also conducted on both GUI cohorts in December 2020 to explore the impact of the pandemic on participants’ lives. This paper outlines the adaptations made to traditional data collection methods in GUI, highlighting the challenges that were met, but also the benefits of some changes that may be worth incorporating into future waves of GUI.

Given growing concerns about disadvantaged boys' achievement and disengagement from learning, this paper investigates differences in reading ability by gender and social origin. It uses data from the Growing Up in Ireland study to investigate how parents' approach to learning at home and children's exposure to early care and ed-ucation contribute to these differences. We find that both children's gender and their family's social class in-fluence their cognitive development between age 3 and age 9, though the effects are additive, with little variation in the gender gap across social class groups. Parents from more advantaged social classes read more to their 3 -year-old children than other parents, yet by age 5, when most children have started primary school, these class differences in parental reading are much lower. Parental reading, ECCE participation and length of primary school exposure were found to facilitate language development and partly explain differences in reading scores at age 9, although strong direct effects of social class remained, even accounting for vocabulary score at age 3. The benefits from parental reading, ECCE and exposure to school are broadly similar for boys and girls, though there is some evidence that boys benefit more than girls from longer exposure to school.

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were widespread concerns about young people’s labour market prospects. This article describes the COVID-19 youth economic activity and health monitor (YEAH) project at University College London (UCL) in collaboration with Statistics Canada and other institutes in Europe, which is aimed to shed light on this area by examining the pandemic’s impacts on the dynamics of youth employment and well-being.

The sudden health and economic crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic affords an opportunity to examine the impact of economic disruption to children and families. Any negative effects on the well-being of children are important to consider in relation to both short- and long-term outcomes. Using pre-pandemic and mid-pandemic waves of the longitudinal Growing Up in Ireland study, we examined whether the impact of economic disruption was equivalent for families who were (or were not) financially vulnerable pre-pandemic. We then investigated whether economic disruption was associated with a negative effect on the emotional well-being of 12-year-olds, and if there was evidence for such a negative effect being mediated through a lack of material resources or strain on family dynamics. Our results indicated that middle-income rather than lowest-income families experienced the most economic disruption, likely reflecting the sector-specific nature of business closures in the pandemic. Families who were financially vulnerable pre-pandemic were less likely to have had suitable resources for homeschooling. Both falls in income and strain in family relationships, such as arguing more with their parents, were associated with poorer scores on a measure of the child's emotional well-being. The emergency income support payment introduced at the start of the pandemic appeared to have a protective effect on the association between family income loss and child well-being, which has wider implications for policy on child poverty.

Educational achievement is one of the key indicators of labour market success, yet previous research shows that in many countries, children from immigrant backgrounds struggle to match their native peers in terms of achievement. Despite high educational aspirations, migrant parents may struggle to "convert" their social and cultural capital to support their children’s achievement in their country of destination. Ireland is an interesting case study as there was substantial and rapid immigration of a diverse group of migrants, many of whom were European, to a school system that was predominantly White, Catholic, Irish and English-speaking. Drawing on the extensive literature on academic achievement of immigrant children and youth, this paper explores the academic achievement of 9-year-old immigrant children in a ‘new immigration country’, just after the peak of inward migration. The results show that unlike in many ‘old’ immigrant- receiving countries, the immigrant "penalty" in achievement in Ireland is modest, with social and cultural capital playing a salient role in English reading achievement, particularly for East Europeans, for whom the gap is greatest. Understanding the patterns of linguistic integration for recent migrant children may help us understand these processes in the case of subsequent movements of children and their families in Europe.

Little is known about cross-national differences in the decline of youth life satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study compares youth in Canada, Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom on life satisfaction before and during the pandemic.

In a new short report released today, the ESRI and Trinity College Dublin launch the results of a special survey of COVID-19 experiences for children and young adults participating in Growing Up in Ireland. These first insights highlight the extent of changes to everyday life as a result of the pandemic and point to likely inequalities in impact.

This article explores the role that home-learning activities (HLAs) play in the relationship between social origin and cognitive development using an Irish birth cohort study, Growing Up in Ireland. Numerous studies using different measures of the home-learning environment (HLE) have shown that it has considerable influence on young children’s cognitive development, and that the HLE is often linked to social origin. We find a social gradient in vocabulary even at age 3 years, with the largest gaps for mothers’ education. Family income, mothers’ education, and social class are also associated with vocabulary independently, though these associations are reduced by adding all three measures simultaneously. The extent of HLAs helps explain a very small part of the education differences and none of the income or social class differences in vocabulary. We find some evidence that HLAs may be more salient for children from families with low income and lower social class backgrounds in terms of supporting vocabulary development, thereby compensating somewhat for disadvantage. HLAs also appear to encourage vocabulary development between age 3 and 5, and play a role in reducing the gap in vocabulary between high- and low-income children.

New Growing Up in Ireland research paints a picture of the lives of 17/18-year-olds in 2016: generally in good health and ambitious for their futures, but with inequalities persisting.

Growing Up in Ireland is the national longitudinal study of children. It was established in 2006 and has followed two groups of Irish children – an older group who were recruited into the study at 9 years of age (the Child Cohort, now called Cohort ‘98) and a younger group who were recruited into the study at 9 months of age (the Infant Cohort, now called Cohort ‘08). The Growing Up in Ireland study is funded by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA), and is overseen by the DCYA in association with the Central Statistics Office. The project has been designed to describe and analyse what it means to be a child in Ireland today and to understand the factors associated with three major areas of children’s development over time: their physical health and growth; their social, emotional and behavioural well-being; and their educational achievements and cognitive development. The longitudinal nature of the project allows researchers and analysts to examine the developmental trajectories and the factors which affect development over time. Providing evidence to inform Government policy relating to children, youth and families is a core objective.

Growing Up in Ireland is the national longitudinal study of children. It tracks the development of two cohorts of children over time: Cohort ’08, most of whom were born in 2008 and formerly called the Infant Cohort; and Cohort ’98, most of whom were born in 1998 and formerly called the Child Cohort. The main objective of the study is to contribute to the development of policies and services to support children in Ireland by increasing the understanding of factors that enhance or undermine the wellbeing of children and families. The study’s conceptual framework draws heavily from Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological model which views the individual child as being an active agent whose development is influenced not only by the face-to-face interactions with individuals in his/her most immediate environment (termed the ‘microsystem’), but also by the wider community and circumstances (‘exosystem’ and ‘macrosystem’) that affect the child directly or through effects on the microsystem (‘mesosystem’). This report is concerned with the younger of the two cohorts in the Growing Up in Ireland study (Cohort ’08). It is based mainly on data collected from this cohort at five years of age in 2013, but also drawing on data collected when the Study Children were aged three and when they were nine months old. Summary findings from this cohort at age nine have been published. This new report provides a further, more indepth description of the circumstances of the children and their families when they were five years old.

Growing Up in Ireland is a national longitudinal cohort study. The project started in 2006 and has followed two groups of Irish children, Cohort ’98 (formerly called the Child Cohort, most of whom were born in 1998) and Cohort ’08 (formerly called the Infant Cohort, most of whom were born in 2008). The principal aim of the project is to examine the factors which shape the development of children in contemporary Ireland and, through this, to contribute to the setting of responsive policies and to the design of services for children and their families. This report describes the design and instrumentation on Growing Up in Ireland’s Cohort ’98 at age 17/18 years. The cohort members have reached age 18 or are approaching this age. This is an important milestone in the life of a young person as it reflects not just a new stage in the life course in terms of developmental maturity but is important in a broader societal context, with a range of civil rights and responsibilities conferred around this time. These include the right to vote, the right to work full time, and the right to consume alcohol. This report is intended to provide a resource for researchers and policymakers to understand the rationale for, and background to, the measures included in the GUI study of 17/18 year olds. This chapter begins with a brief description of the background and objectives of Growing Up in Ireland. A summary of the conceptual framework underlying the project is also provided and this report documents how this framework is reflected in the instrumentation which was used when the young people at the centre of the study were 17/18 years of age.

This report describes the design and instrumentation on Growing Up in Ireland’s Cohort ’98 at age 17/18 years. The cohort members have reached age 18 or are approaching this age. This is an important milestone in the life of a young person as it reflects not just a new stage in the life course in terms of developmental maturity but is important in a broader societal context, with a range of civil rights and responsibilities conferred around this time. These include the right to vote, the right to work full time, and the right to consume alcohol. This report is intended to provide a resource for researchers and policymakers to understand the rationale for, and background to, the measures included in the GUI study of 17/18 year olds. This chapter begins with a brief description of the background and objectives of Growing Up in Ireland. A summary of the conceptual framework underlying the project is also provided and this report documents how this framework is reflected in the instrumentation which was used when the young people at the centre of the study were 17/18 years of age.