Growing up in Ireland: The lives of 9 year olds

Abstract

This report presents the first descriptive analysis of the findings from the first wave of data collection with the 8,570 nine-year-old children, their families and teachers who have participated in Growing Up in Ireland ? the National Longitudinal Study of Children. The data were collected between September 2007 and June 2008. This report is one of a series describing the background literature, the design, instrumentation and the findings of the Growing Up in Ireland project. Growing Up in Ireland tracks the development of two cohorts of children, one aged nine years and one aged nine months. This report addresses the first objective of Growing Up in Ireland: `to describe the lives of children in Ireland?. It will provide a comprehensive picture of how the nine-year-old children are faring across the main domains of their development and their daily life experience. The findings will be presented for all children and will also be presented by the sex of the child. Where interesting differences occur in relation to the children?s social class and family type, these data will be reported. This report is straightforwardly descriptive. The next report on the findings of the nine-year-old survey will be analytic, that is, it will examine more closely relationships between the child?s wellbeing and developmental status and a wide range of factors that may impact on the child?s development. Although both scheduled reports will aim to be as comprehensive as possible it should be borne in mind that the amount of data collected in Growing Up in Ireland is considerable and it is amenable to much more analysis. All the data will be lodged in a national archive, the Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA), for other researchers to access, analyse and publish. The data will also be used again from a different perspective when the next wave of the longitudinal study is conducted. At that point, in the case of this cohort, it will be possible to relate the child?s status and development at age 9 to their outcomes at age 13.