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.
Growing Up in Ireland (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 CSO is responsible for the survey itself: designing and building the survey; collecting, processing, and analysing the data, and facilitating data access to researchers and policy makers. DCDE has responsibility for the wider elements of the GUI study: engaging with policy and scientific stakeholders to gather requirements; consulting with children and young people; identifying research needs, data priorities and objectives, and promoting the use of GUI data for research and policy development. GUI is a critical instrument which facilitates policy makers and researchers to examine the factors that shape the development of children and young people in Ireland and which, through this, contributes to the setting of responsive policies and the design of services for children and families.
The GUI study was established in 2006 and originally followed two groups of children in Ireland: Cohort '98 and Cohort '08. Cohort ’98 joined the study when they were 9-years old, and Cohort '08 joined the study when they were 9-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 Cohort ’08 will be aged 17/18 in the next wave of data collection planned for 2025. In September 2024, the CSO and DCDE launched a third GUI cohort: Cohort '24. Around 16,000 households with 9-month-old infants will have been invited to participate by the end of data collection for Wave 1 of Cohort '24 in September 2025.
For Growing Up in Ireland Cohort '08 at 9-months and at 13 years, the focus of the study was on child outcomes in the following three domains:
For Cohort '08 Wave 1, all children who would be 9-months old between September 2008 and April 2009 (that is, at the time of interview) were identified from the Child Benefit Register. This resulted in a total eligible population of 41,185 children, which was then pre-stratified by marital status, county of residence, nationality, and number of children in the claim. The sample was then selected using a simple systematic selection procedure based on a random start and constant sampling fraction.
Growing Up in Ireland is a longitudinal study and follows the same children and their families across each wave. Thus, the target sample for Wave 2 was the 11,134 sampled children who participated at Wave 1 of the study. No additions were made to this sample, and the only exits were due to inter-wave non-response or attrition (including emigration), or cases where the child had sadly deceased.
Data collection for Cohort '08 Wave 1 took place between September 2008 and April 2009 and was carried out by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
In households where there were 9-month-old twins or triplets, the adult respondents completed one main Primary and Secondary Caregiver interview a Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewer (CAPI) as well as a CAPI interview in respect of one of the twins. They then completed a ‘Twin Module’ for the second child on a Pencil and Paper Interview (PAPI) basis; in the case of triplets, questions relating to the third child were also completed on paper. The latter modules repeated only the child-related questions, this time to be answered in relation to the second twin or triplet. The modules also contained some specific questions on parenting twins, such as identical/fraternal status, age at which differences were noticed, and so on. The interviewer was instructed to administer the twin modules in all households with 9-month-old twins or triplets, even when their presence was unknown to the Study Team interviewers prior to the visit to the household, subject to agreement from the main caregiver.
The parents of more than 650 twins or triplets were interviewed in the first phase of GUI Cohort ‘08 when the children were 9-months old and data was collected on each 9-month-old. In some households, both twins were sampled for interview independently so both twins’ data was published in the subsequent, weighted data files. In other cases, only one twin was sampled for interview, in these cases the data for the other twin was not part of the subsequent, weighted data files. The data in this release includes the previously unused data on non-sampled twins.
The figures presented are unweighted as some of the twins are not part of the original weighted sample, as such, the results presented should be interpreted with caution and are not nationally representative. In addition, due to the unequal sample size between twins and singletons comparisons are illustrative rather than empirical.
The ASQ was developed as a means of monitoring child development through parental report so that any indication of delay can be investigated promptly (Squires, Potter & Bricker, 1999). The five developmental domains on the ASQ are communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving and personal/social. A range of questions was included in wave 1 data collection within each domain so that the 6-, 8-, 10- and 12-month questionnaires were effectively administered to each child.
The original test authors derived the target score for each skill based on their original sample of American children. The ASQ 2, as used in Growing Up in Ireland, is divided into two-monthly interval questionnaires at the infant stage. The 10-month questionnaire is used for reference here, rather than the 8-month, as infants had already passed their 9-month birthday. The 1% of infants who were born very premature (earlier than 33 weeks’ gestation) are excluded from these analyses. This is because such infants are, as expected, not as developmentally advanced as babies born closer to full term.
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