Growing Up in Ireland : National Longitudinal Study of Children : The Infants and their Families

Growing Up in Ireland – the National Longitudinal Study of Children tracks the development of two groups of children – an Infant Cohort (starting at nine months) and a Child Cohort (starting at nine years). The current report presents a descriptive analysis of the findings from the first wave of data collection with the 11,100 families of the nine-month-old children who participated in the Infant Cohort. The report provides a comprehensive picture of the life of infants in Ireland today, across the main domains of their development, with a view to furthering our understanding of the broad spectrum of their experiences and circumstances. The next report from the Infant Cohort will be analytic in nature; that is, it will examine more closely relationships between the child’s wellbeing and developmental status on the one hand, and, on the other, a wide range of factors which may affect 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 information collected in Growing Up in Ireland is considerable and it is amenable to much more analysis. The quantitative data from the project will be lodged (on a strictly anonymised basis) in the Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA1). This will provide access to the data for researchers, policymakers and other interested parties. The data will also be used again, from a different perspective, when the next wave of the longitudinal study is conducted – when the children are three years of age. At that point, it will be possible to relate the child’s wellbeing and development in infancy (at nine months) to outcomes in early childhood (at three years)