The ESRI has taken the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of social research to revisit publications that were particularly notable and injected new knowledge into the public policy sphere. The publications highlighted below span five decades of groundbreaking research across a broad spectrum of social policy issues.
This publication was the first study of farm families in Ireland since the Arensberg and Kimball study conducted in the early 1930s. Researchers conducted extensive interviews with 408 husband-wife pairs in the west of Ireland to examine how changes in the economic, cultural and social environment in recent decades had impacted on the ways in which interpersonal relationships develop within families. The study documented the main characteristics of family relationships and interactions, focussing on three dimensions of family life: the division of labour between men and women; authority or decision-making patterns (the extent to which decision-making is controlled by the father or shared within the family); and socio-emotional patterns (the extent to which the father plays an active, emotionally supportive role in conflict resolution and in expressive-emotional relationships with his wife and children).
This study provided the first systematic evidence base on the level of educational expenditure and the way in which resources vary across different levels of the system and types of school. It highlighted the way in which the introduction of free secondary education facilitated increased educational participation rates but without providing additional resources for the educational system itself. The report pointed to rising costs in education, as the contribution of the Catholic Church declined, the number of religious orders providing teaching services decreased and the curriculum changed to include subjects requiring more costly equipment. Such budgetary pressures were to be exacerbated by a rising youth population and increasing school participation rates. The issue of the implications of demographic increases for educational expenditure remain no less pertinent almost forty years on.
This study identified effective strategies to increase the numbers of female students taking maths, science and technical subjects in order to change the type of education provided to girls, which the authors stated left them at a serious life-time disadvantage in the labour market.
The research found that sex differentiation in the educational system was deeply institutionalised: in the cultural presumptions underlying the provision of subjects and the design of curricula, in the expectations of parents and teachers, and in the educational attitudes and expectations of the students themselves. The authors put forward an urgent case for intervention to change the provision, allocation and choice of subjects for girls but highlighted that formal access to subjects would have to be accompanied by a supportive school environment in order for girls and boys to take non-traditional subjects and to perform well in them.
In the opening paragraphs of this publication, the authors state that “inequalities of mobility opportunities are the crucial mechanism by which resource differences between individuals and families become perpetuated across the life cycle and across generations”. With this in mind, the study sought to measure the extent of equality of opportunity in Ireland. The authors used data from two large samples of Dublin males to assess the opportunities available to move from one class to another. The results were compared with similar studies conducted in England, Wales and Sweden.
While the study found evidence of a substantial amount of upward mobility in Ireland, the extent of mobility, particularly long-range upward mobility, was less than that observed in the other three countries. In Ireland, the composition of the higher professional and managerial class was found to be much more homogenous, with the chances of men born into this particular class in Ireland remaining in this class 240 times greater than the chances of the non-skilled moving to the highest class.
In order to inform effective policymaking in the area of poverty reduction, this study presented the first detailed estimates of the prevalence of poverty in Ireland, the causal factors at work and the role of the social welfare system in tackling poverty. The study used data from a large-scale national household survey carried out by the ESRI in 1987 on Income Distribution, Poverty and Usage of State Services, in addition to Household Budget Surveys from 1973 and 1980.
The study estimated that about 30 per cent of the population were living below the relative poverty line (that is, 60 per cent of average income), a figure that prompted considerable national debate. The findings highlighted the complex relationship between income and deprivation and the importance of taking a multi-dimensional approach to the measurement of poverty. The study was followed by an extensive programme of research on poverty and deprivation at the ESRI, with researchers presenting an increasingly nuanced understanding of the dynamics of poverty. This body of research has had a significant impact on policy development and on the identification of groups at particular risk of poverty, especially families with children.
With the aim of finding out how educational qualifications influence young people’s experiences in the labour market, this study examined what happened to a cohort of young people who left school in 1982. For a period of five and a half years, the study tracked every job, every period of unemployment and every training programme in which they participated.
The study found that not only did educational qualifications continue to impact chances of employment 5 and a half years after leaving school but that differences in unemployment rates among those with different levels of academic qualifications widened over this period, meaning that the unqualified fall further behind the rest over time.
The study concluded that interventions to assist unqualified school leavers, such as training programmes, are probably insufficient to tackle the problems they face and pointed to the importance of factors outside the educational system, including the pre-school environment and the relationships between family, community and school.
