• Social Variation in Child Health & Development: A Life-course Approach

    None of the many critical moments in Ireland’s often tumultuous history was more significant or defining than the Easter Rising of 1916. Central to the Rising was the Proclamation of Independence, in which Pádraig Pearse declared the new nation’s resolve to cherish all its children equally. CHERISHI…

  • Parental Investment & Child Development

    None of the many critical moments in Ireland’s often tumultuous history was more significant or defining than the Easter Rising of 1916. Central to the Rising was the Proclamation of Independence, in which Pádraig Pearse declared the new nation’s resolve to cherish all its children equally. CHERISHI…

  • Young People’s Mental Health Changes, Risk, and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

    Importance As young people’s mental health difficulties increase, understanding risk and resilience factors under challenging circumstances becomes critical. Objective To explore the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic on secondary school students’ mental health difficulties, as well as the associatio…

  • Functional Outcomes Among Young People With Trajectories of Persistent Childhood Psychopathology

    Importance Understanding which children in the general population are at greatest risk of poor functional outcomes could improve early screening and intervention strategies. Objective To investigate the odds of poor outcomes in emerging adulthood (ages 17 to 20 years) for children with different men…

  • Association of Birth Weight Centiles and Gestational Age With Cognitive Performance at Age 5 Years

    Importance Birth weight percentiles (BWPs) are often dichotomized at the 10th percentile and show statistically significant association with later cognitive performance, for both preterm and term-born children. However, research testing nonlinear associations between BWPs and cognitive performance i…

  • Preterm birth and expressive language development across the first 5 years of life: A nationally-representative longitudinal path analysis

    Multiple factors including the child’s non-linguistic characteristics and caregiving environment can affect language development. Since preterm birth (<37 weeks’ gestation) can negatively affect language development, this study used path analysis to investigate whether the influence of preterm birth…

  • Characteristics and behaviours of young people who meet online contacts face-to-face

    The internet provides opportunities for social interactions which first occur in an online environment that can lead to meeting up in real life. However, growing concerns around safety and privacy warrant greater study of this modern-day phenomenon. Using a longitudinal dataset of approximately 4,30…

  • A Latent Class Analysis of Mental Health Symptoms in Primary School Children: Exploring Associations with School Attendance Problems

    Although there is a wealth of research addressing the association between mental health and school absenteeism, there are calls for a better understanding of how mental health difficulties might predict SAPs (Egger et al., 2003; Finning et al., 2022; Ingul et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2012). The aim o…

  • Parental investment or parenting stress? Examining the links between poverty and child development in Ireland

    This study investigates the relationship between multidimensional household poverty and cognitive and behavioural development during the formative years of childhood (from 9 months to 9 years), using nationally representative longitudinal data from Ireland for the cohort of children born in 2007-200…

  • Civic and political engagement among young adults in Ireland

    International research has shown that civic engagement, that is, volunteering in local services, can benefit both young people and their communities, while political engagement can strengthen a society’s democratic culture. The Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures (2019) policy framework highlights the…

  • Associations between parental smoking and teenage alcohol and drug use in the Growing Up in Ireland cohort study: a longitudinal observational study

    Background Children with a parent who smokes are more likely to become substance users than those who do not have a parent who smokes. In this study, we examined whether childhood or early adolescent exposure to primary parent smoking increased the risk of subsequent teenage alcohol and drug use at…

  • Divergent trajectories: three dimensions of child poverty during the Great Recession in Ireland

    While research has investigated the effects of the Great Recession on the Irish economy using economic indicators or cross-sectional household-level data, this research note applies group-based multitrajectory modelling to provide a more nuanced approach. Using nationally representative, longitudina…

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