Growing Up in Ireland Conference

Growing Up in Ireland – the National Longitudinal Study of Children, will hold its third annual research conference on Thursday 1^st December 2011 at the D4 Berkeley Hotel, Lansdowne Rd, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.

The conference will be opened by Ms Frances Fitzgerald TD, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, who will launch some Key Findings from the recently completed Infant Cohort (at 3 years) as well as some of the first longitudinal findings from the study.

The Keynote speaker is Professor Edward Melhuish, Professor of Human Development at Birkbeck, University of London and Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London. He is an internationally recognised expert in the study of child development and childcare and has extensive experience with longitudinal studies. His research interests include child development, parenting, childcare and early education.

A total of 24 papers will be presented at the conference, by researchers from a wide range of third level and research institutions. These will be based on data from Growing Up in Ireland’s Child and Infant Cohorts and will focus on a range of topics including health, parenting, education and childcare.

Early booking is encouraged and bookings should only be made on the registration form below and sent to Guiconference2011@esri.ie.

For further details, including the programme see:

http://www.growingup.ie/index.php?id=221

Losing our religion? Religious attendance amongst Irish children

Once upon a time, and it probably wasn’t that long ago, young people in Ireland went to church because thats what people did. But the position of religion in Ireland has changed dramatically in recent years and we also have a more heterogenous population because of immigration. So what is the situation now?

The Growing Up in Ireland survey asked parents how often their children (9 year olds) attend religious service.

The graph shows the responses. Virtually none attend on a daily basis and about 50% on a weekly basis. About 28% attend either monthly or less often.Around 14% attend on special occasions, presumably Christmas, weddings and so on.

There is an interesting rural/urban split (not shown here) with the “weekly” category much higher in rural areas (roughly 57% vs. 37%). The data does not allow one to distinguish between different denominations or Christian vs. non-Christian faiths.

These numbers don’t augur well for organized religions in the future ‘though probably some are doing much better than others.

Smoking and drinking while pregnant

Smoking and drinking while pregnant is generally acknowledged to be a bad for the child's health depending, of course, on the extent of it. So how common is it and what are some of the predictors?
Using Growing Up in Ireland data I graph the mothers response to a question which asked about this. About 60% never drank and less than 40% said occasionally. For smoking about 75% never smoked though about 13% smoked daily.
These questions were asked 9 years after the child was born and are probably under-estimates. One is less likely, I think, to overstate one's drinking or smoking.
If one does some simple multivariate (ordered probit) analysis it is striking that there are some very different patterns:
Older mothers are more likely to have consumed alcohol than younger mothers while pregnant but young mothers are more likely to smoke than the older ones. Income also has opposite effects being positively associated with drinking and negatively associated with smoking. The same is true for mothers education. Likewise medical card holders are more (less) likely to smoke (drink). So there seems to be a clear class divide. These effects are simultaneous, remember.
The one factor I found which had a consistent effect (& there are many other possible factors which I didn't look at) was a question that asked the respondent "Would you describe yourself as religious/spiritual?". Those that answered in the higher categories ("very much so" or "extremely") were significantly less likely to have smoked or drank alcohol while pregnant.
It is interesting to speculate whether this has something to do with an association between religiousity and discount rates. It seems there may be positive externalities from religion/spirituality.

Some Irish boys are better at maths than girls

Differences between the sexes in educational attainment are of interest to many people. In Ireland, as elsewhere, males are being left behind by females in key exams and university entrance. So where does it all start and is it the same for everyone?
Using the Growing up in Ireland data I look at differences in maths score: I estimate quantile regressions controlling for a bunch of chararacteristics (SES, birthweight, maternal smoking, income and more). These show the effect of being male on the maths score at different points of the conditional distribution : so high quantiles are not "high test scores" but "high test scores conditional on the covariates one has included". I interpret this as proxying unobserved ability, this could be cognitive ability but not necessarily. The outcome is scaled to have a mean of 100 and a std deviation of 15.
The results are striking. Boys do better on average so a linear regression gives a coefficient of about 1.2. By comparison, being right-handed or having been breastfed is worth an extra 1.4 points. But at lower quantiles the effects are smaller and are not statistically significant. At higher quantiles the effect is around 4 points.
So I interpret this as saying that at low levels of unobserved ability it doesn't matter if the child is a boy or girl. But for "smarter" children being a boy is an advantage i.e. being male and being "smart" are complements.

Handedness and ability at maths: evidence from Ireland

There is a great deal of interest both popularly and amongst scholars about whether cognitive ability is predicted by handedness. The literature contains many findings which cannot be simply summarized and there are many many myths. Evidence for Ireland has been non-existent, as far as I am aware, until now with the release of the Growing Up in Ireland data.
So what can we say? Below I plot the density of attainment at a maths test that the 8 year olds in GUI sat.
Sadly, if you are a ciotóg, you can see the distribution is shifted to the left - but not by much. The good news is that when you look at the distribution of reading ability, there is no difference at all.
In numerical terms, left-handers are about 8% of a standard deviation lower. By comparison girls are about 11.5% of one standard deviation lower.

Are some Irish mothers "too posh to push"?

The use of C-section to deliver babies has tended to go up over time and has generated some concern. It is, after all, a significant operation and can have negative consequences. For example mothers are less likely to breastfeed after a C-section.

It is sometimes argued that mothers elect to have C-sections as they are “too posh to push”. Leaving aside the question of whether this is a good or bad thing: is it actually true? Using the Growing Up in Ireland data I estimate some simple probit models predicting the probability of elective and emergency c-sections. Household income (equivalised & in log form) is positively associated with having a C-section. But the coefficient for emergency c-section is almost twice as big as that of elective. This doesn’t fit in with a simple story of affluent mothers choosing to have c-section. I have no idea why income would have such an effect on emergency C-sections.

Mother’s education, interestingly, seems to have no effect (& remember education is generally seen as a better measure of socio-economic status than income) nor does a measure of social class (not shown here) nor does whether the mother smoke or drank during pregnancy. Factors that do predict a c-section include the mother’s BMI and her age (for the elective case) and the baby’s birth-weight (for the emergency case). Clearly many other factors may influence these outcomes & not all of which are in this data.

So while there is clearly a connection between how well-off a mother is and whether she delivers via a C-section its not at all clear that it is a simple case of "money talks".

	(1)	(2)
	elective	emergency
log income	0.0168*	0.0292***
	(2.41)	(3.96)
mother's educ	-0.00209	0.00246
	(0.73)	(0.81)
birthweight	-0.0101	-0.0322***
	(1.77)	(5.20)
born on time	0.0693***	-0.0590***
	(8.73)	(6.58)
" early	0.193***	-0.00267
	(7.86)	(0.23)
" very early	0.126*	0.214***
	(2.44)	(4.26)
partner	0.0186	-0.0114
	(1.82)	(0.96)
girl	-0.00154	-0.0202**
	(0.24)	(2.95)
Mothers BMI	0.00346***	0.00427***
	(5.32)	(6.22)
" smoke	-0.00852	-0.00414
	(1.62)	(0.78)
" drink	-0.0121	-0.00234
	(1.93)	(0.35)
Age	0.00565***	-0.000325
	(8.71)	(0.48)
N	7020	7020
pseudo R2	0.065	0.055

Marginal effects; Absolute t statistics in parentheses

^{* p<0.05,**p<.01,***p<.001}