The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the wellbeing of migrant young people in Ireland

ABSTRACT

The world-wide COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted education, with school closures leading to a shift to remote learning. Existing and emerging research has shown that even a relatively short period of missed school has negative consequences for academic and social outcomes among children and young people, especially for those from more vulnerable families. While emerging research drawing on cross-sectional data has focussed on how the pandemic has affected immigrant youth, there is a paucity of longitudinal studies in this field. In this paper, we used the longitudinal Growing Up in Ireland study to investigate and analyse the wellbeing of migrant-origin 12-year-olds in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research shows that compared to their Irish peers, immigrant adolescents had poorer wellbeing, partly related to differences in family support for remote learning, in experiences of poor-quality interaction with peers and in levels of family strain.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• immigrant young people
• education
• Ireland

Acknowledgements

The paper draws on data from Cohort '08 of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) study accessed via the Irish Social Science Data Archive – www.ucd.ie/issda. Additional analysis on the country of origin of migrant families was derived from the RMF version of the data. Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) is funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY). It is managed by DCEDIY in association with the Central Statistics Office (CSO). These results are based on analyses of data from Research Microdata Files provided by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Neither the CSO nor DCEDIY take any responsibility for the views expressed or the outputs generated from these analyses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This pattern may relate to the greater concentration of migrant workers in sectors such as retail (food) which remained open during the lockdown.