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CSO Frontier Series outputs may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release.
Learn more about CSO Frontier Series outputs.
GUI is the national, longitudinal study of children and young people in Ireland. It is a collaborative study between the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and the Department of Children, Disability and Equality (DCDE).
The GUI study was established in 2006 and is a unique longitudinal study that originally followed two groups of children in Ireland: Cohort ’98, who joined the study when they were nine years old, and Cohort ’08, who joined the study when they were nine months old. These two cohorts have been surveyed at regular intervals since then. Cohort ’98 were aged 25 at their last wave of data collection and the main results of the survey were published in January 2025. Cohort ’08 will be aged 17/18 in the next wave of data collection, planned for Q3 2025. In September 2024, the CSO and DCDE launched a third GUI cohort: Cohort ’24. Households with nine-month-old babies will be invited to participate up until Q3 2025.
Between September 2008 and April 2009, more than 11,000 families with nine-month-old children were interviewed as part of Cohort ’08, with follow up waves being completed when the children were aged three years, five years, seven/eight years, nine years, and 13 years. This analysis uses data from when the children were three years old, collected from 9,793 families between December 2010 and July 2011. This Frontier Series research paper is the first release utilising data from non-resident parents in the GUI survey.
The Growing Up in Ireland Cohort ’08 Wave 2 dataset used for this analysis may be made available to researchers on an anonymous and strictly confidential basis at the discretion of the CSO. For more information see Background Notes.
The CSO would like to acknowledge the work of Catherine Fraser, who worked with the Growing Up in Ireland team on this project as part of the CSO’s Graduate Programme. We wish to extend our appreciation and thanks to her for leading the analysis and production of this release.
Particular care should be taken when reporting these results given the small sample size. When quoting statistics from this release, it should be noted that the results are based on the responses of 137 participants surveyed and are not reflective of the overall population.
The CSO would like to thank the many contributors to Growing Up in Ireland Cohort ’08. In particular, we would like to thank the resident parents and the non-resident parents who responded to this survey, for their responses and for recognising the importance of facilitating the collection of this highly significant data.
As well as the strict legal protections set out in the Statistics Act, 1993, and other existing regulations, the CSO is committed to protecting individual privacy. All identifiable information is removed so that no individual or household can be identified in the published data.
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.
Introduction
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (30 May 2025) published a Frontier Series research paper that presents data on parents who reside separately from their child. The data was collected as part of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) survey.
GUI is a longitudinal study centered around children and young people in Ireland, and this research paper analyses data from Wave 2 of data collection for Cohort ’08, when the child was three years old. Throughout this paper, the term non-resident parent refers to a parent of the child who did not live at the child’s primary address at the time of data collection (excluding temporary absences), and the term primary resident parent refers to the parent living with the child at the time of the interview who provided most care to the child.
Close to 10,000 (9,793) households with a three-year-old child were interviewed as part of GUI Cohort ’08 Wave 2. Some 1,172 primary resident parents indicated that their child had a non-resident parent. However, before the non-resident parent could be contacted, permission and contact details had to first be obtained from the primary resident parent. Contact details were provided for almost 400 and responses were obtained from 137 of them. Analysis was carried out both on the responses of the non-resident parents, and on the responses of the primary resident parents to questions regarding the non-resident parents.
Due to the small number of respondents and the nature by which the contact details for the non-resident parents were collected, particular care must be taken when interpreting these results. Given the small sample size, even weighting the results would not mitigate against bias and thus the unweighted figures are presented here.