This release is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example, new administrative data sources.
An online questionnaire for the Pulse Survey ‘COVID - Our Lives Five Years On’ was conducted by the CSO from Thursday 16th January to Sunday 2nd February 2025. The questionnaire was open to anyone aged 18 and over who was living in private accommodation in the Republic of Ireland. As part of the CSO ‘Take Part’ Campaign the online Pulse Survey electronic questionnaire was available on the CSO.ie website and on all CSO social media platforms. There were 21,003 responses.
The questionnaire asked for information on the following topics:
The results in the 'COVID-19 - Our Lives Five Years On’ publication reflect only the responses of those who completed the Pulse Survey questionnaire. While results are calibrated to Irish population totals, the findings cannot be generalised to the entire Irish population, as the people who answered the questionnaire were not chosen at random from the population.
Sample-selection is not applicable as responding to this online pulse survey is voluntary for anyone aged 18 years and older and living in a private household in the Republic of Ireland.
Data collection for this reference period: 16 January to 02 February.
Responding to this survey is voluntary.
Data are collected directly from survey respondents through the Pulse Survey online electronic questionnaire.
Each variable is assessed by the CSO to identify implausible submissions.
The CSO is prohibited, under the Statistics Act, from releasing any information it collects that could identify any person, business, or organization. Various confidentiality rules are applied to all data that are released or published to prevent the publication or disclosure of any information deemed confidential. If necessary, data are suppressed to prevent direct or residual disclosure of identifiable data.
Respondents were asked for information relating to their demographic characteristics as well as the subject matter of the survey. Characteristics included: sex, age, county of residence, principal economic status, highest level of education completed, tenure and general health status.
Demographic characteristics were used to calibrate the data (see following section Benchmarking Calibration) and were not investigated in this publication but may be in further analyses. See below for descriptions of each characteristic.
Sex: Male or female
Age: The respondents were asked their age
NUTS3 Regions: NUTS3 regions are derived from respondents' county of residence.
These regions are comprised as follows:
| Northern & Western NUTS2 Region | Southern NUTS2 Region | Eastern & Midland NUTS2 Region | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Border | Cavan Donegal Leitrim Monaghan Sligo |
Mid-West | Clare Limerick Tipperary |
Dublin | Dublin City Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Fingal South Dublin |
| South-East | Carlow Kilkenny Waterford Wexford |
Mid-East | Kildare Louth Meath Wicklow |
||
| West | Galway Mayo Roscommon |
South-West | Cork Kerry |
Midland | Laois Longford Offaly Westmeath |
Principal economic status: Respondents were asked which of the following best represents their situation.
Highest level of education completed: Respondents were asked to select the highest level of education or training they have ever successfully completed from the following options:
Number of persons living in the household: Respondents were asked how many persons were living in their household.
Number of children under 18 in the household: Respondents were asked how many children under 18 were living in their household.
Tenure: Respondents were asked their current housing situation
Financial situation: Respondents were asked to rate the financial situation of their household now and in early 2020
General health status: Respondents were asked how their health is in general.
The following process was used to counteract some of the potential bias within the survey respondents, and to make the final calibrated distribution of respondents as representative as possible of the population.
The Labour Force Survey (LFS) Q4 2024 population estimates (the most recently available estimates at the time of analysis) were used to benchmark the Pulse dataset across key characteristics for calibration. The individual weights were inflated to match overall population total and then calibrated using CALMAR calibration adjustment program to ensure that benchmarked respondent totals matched the LFS Q4 2024 benchmark totals for a number of key characteristics including sex, age, region, principal economic status, and tenure.
Benchmarking calibration has been used to adjust to key population totals to match current population distributions with respondent distributions. However, given the voluntary nature of the data collection tool and the non-random nature of respondents, it is unlikely that we can fully account for bias inherent in the data. For this reason, caution should be taken when attempting to make inferences to the entire population from these results.
Population distributions from LFS Q4 2024 were compared with the respondent distributions across key characteristics (i.e., sex, age, region, principal economic status, tenure and educational attainment) both before and after weighting in Table 8.1.
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