Growing Up in Ireland - the National Longitudinal Study of Children is a landmark study of children and youth which has been running since 2006. The objectives of the study are outlined in a separate publication (Greene et al. 2010). In summary, the project seeks to further our understanding of what it means to be a child or young person growing up in modern Ireland, with a view to informing policy on what both helps and hinders development. A two cohort, cross-sequential longitudinal design was adopted and began with one cohort (Cohort ‘08) of 11,134 infants (aged 9 months) and a second cohort (Cohort ‘98) of 8,568 9-year-olds. Being longitudinal in nature, the same participants are followed over time. The families of Cohort ‘08 have been interviewed when the children were 9 months, 3 years, 5 years and subsequently 9 years of age, while Cohort ’98 and their parents/guardians were interviewed at 9, 13 and 17/18 years of age. This wave of data concerns the Wave 4 interviews of Cohort ‘98 at 20 years of age. As the 20-year-olds are now adults, they are regarded as the main respondents. One parent was also asked to complete questionnaires. All 20-year-olds who were successfully interviewed in the main study at Wave 4 were invited to self-complete the Time-Use Diary. These data have been collected by Growing Up in Ireland, the national longitudinal study of children and young people. The study is funded by Government and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) is the project sponsor. The study is carried out by the GUI Research Team at DCEDIY, in partnership with the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The Department leads on research aspects of GUI, such as identifying data needs in advance of each wave, and conducting or commissioning policy relevant analyses of available data; and the CSO leads on GUI data collection and the production of statistical outputs. GUI data are collected under the strict confidentiality requirements of the Statistics Act 1993.
Probability: Stratified: Proportional. A two-stage design was adopted. In the first instance a random sample of Primary Schools was recruited and at the second stage a sample of nine-year old children was selected from the sample of schools. The design required that the sample be regionally representative with no spatial bias. In addition, no oversampling or booster sampling of subgroups was required. There was a total of 56,497 nine-year-olds registered in the Census of Population in 2006 so a sample size of 8,568 represented approximately 14 percent or about 1 in every 7 of the nine-year-olds resident in the country. For Wave 4 (at age 20) the Study Team approached all previous participants unless the family had previously definitively refused to be contacted in future waves of the study or was not eligible (i.e. the whole family had moved abroad or the young adult was sadly deceased). In total, contact details for 7,925 20-year-olds were issued to interviewers in Wave 4. Questionnaires were completed by 5,190 20-year-olds (the main respondents in this wave), which represented 65 per cent of the cases issued to interviewers. The Young Adult (formerly known as Study Child or Young Person) is the longitudinal focus of Growing Up in Ireland. We are interested throughout the study in tracking, interviewing, measuring and testing the Young Adult, regardless of changes in his/her family composition, structure or geographical location. In this respect the study is based on a pure, fixed panel of participants who were 9 years of age at the time of first interview. After the initial sample recruitment, no additions were made to the sample, with the only loss being through interwave non-response or attrition (including moving outside the jurisdiction) and children who deceased between waves of interviewing. Therefore, the longitudinal population in the study is the population of 9-year-olds (and their main Caregivers) who were resident in Ireland at Wave 1 and who continued to be resident in Ireland at Waves 2, 3 and 4.
Face-to-face interview: CAPI/CAMI
Self-administered questionnaire: Paper
Self-administered questionnaire: Computer-assisted (CASI)
