The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for policy in relation to children and young people: a research review
Smyth and fellow collaborators at ESRI, Dublin.
Research questions:
How has COVID-19 impacted on the lives of children and young people in terms of their family and peer relationships; formal and informal learning; physical and mental health and wellbeing; and transitions to further/higher education, training and the youth labour market?
Type(s) of inequality and how inequality is defined:
Inequality is defined as the differences in social class, education and/or household income across groups of children, young people and families.
Approach or method used:
In our modern societies, opportunities and rewards are still unequally distributed across different social groups (e.g. between women and men, people from different families of origins, between migrants and nationals). Our research on socio-economic inequalities will focus on the development and perpetuation of inequalities during individuals’ life course and the role of contextual factors. In particular, it will analyse the individual, family and institutional factors which shape and drive a variety of inequalities that emerge during the early and middle years of childhood across a range of outcomes, including cognitive development, school achievement and engagement, well-being and pro-social behaviour. A multi-dimensional approach will be used to analyse the effect of children’s family background, disentangling the influences of parental education, social class, household income, family structure and ethnicity on children’s outcomes, as well as recognising the potential of intersectionality.
We will also be looking at resilience at individual and community level and the ways in which people and communities thrive in the face of adversity. Under this theme, our research will analyse:
(1) the features of these resilient people and the factors (individual, family and contextual) which contributed to their success in the face of adversity
(2) childhood and youth experiences that helped them to build resilience and develop positive outcomes later in life
(3) spill-over effects of resilience from a particular life domain to other domains
(4) the relation between resilient people and resilient communities
We are focussing on the research questions listed below. Further detail of the specific focus, data sets and quantitative methods that will be applied to carry out this analysis can be found under each question.
This research links closely to our work around Education and the Labour Market, as well as Age, Crime, Justice and Gender.