Growing Up in Ireland - the National Longitudinal Study of Children, is the first survey of its kind ever undertaken in Ireland and, as such, aims to explore the many and varied factors that contribute to or undermine the wellbeing of children currently living there. A two age cohort longitudinal design was adopted with one cohort of 11,134 infants (aged nine months) and the other of 8,568 nine-year olds, with a view to improving and understanding of children’s development across a range of domains. Since the survey is longitudinal in nature respondents in both cohorts are interviewed on a number of occasions over the following few years. The 8,568 children representing the nine-year cohort were born between 1st November 1997 and 31st October 1998. The nine year cohort and their parents/guardians were interviewed for a second time at thirteen years of age. Data collection for the second wave at 13 years took place between August 2011 and March 2012 and resulted in a completed datafile of 7,525 cases. Data collection for the third wave at 17/18 years took place between April 2015 and August 2016 and resulted in a completed datafile of 6,216 cases. Data Linkage – Central Applications Office (CAO) data Respondents to Wave 3 were asked for their permission to link to the Central Applications Office (CAO) data on all applications to higher education courses. If the Young Person had already made an application for a higher education course through the CAO, their CAO number was recorded. Those who had not made an application at the time of interview but who were planning to apply in the future were asked for consent to be contacted by the Study Team in April 2017 to record their CAO number at that point. Of the 6,216 respondents in Wave 3, 3,203 (52%) gave permission to access their CAO records and successful linkage was achieved for 3,061 cases (49%). Information on the course codes of up to 10 Level 6/7 courses and up to 10 Level 8 courses chosen by the Young Person; up to 3 course offers received and the course accepted was released from the CAO for those that had consented to the data linkage. To make the data more user-friendly, the Study Team extracted the Higher Education Institute (HEI), the subject area, and the points level (Low / Medium / High / Restricted course), for every choice, offer and acceptance. The rankings of the course offers and the accepted course (first / second / third choice etc.) are also provided, as well as variables indicating the number of level 6/7 courses and the number of level 8 courses chosen. For confidentiality reasons, the AMF only includes information on the total number of choices and offers, the level and ranking of offers and accepted courses.

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. Approximately 81 percent of those who took part at Wave 2 took part in Wave 3.

Face-to-face interview: CAPI/CAMI

Self-administered questionnaire: Computer-assisted