School Leavers Survey – Frequently Asked Questions

 

If you have any queries on the School Leavers Survey please read through these frequently asked questions (FAQs) which cover the most common queries received. If your query is not answered here, please contact us on issda@ucd.ie.

 

Q. Can you tell me if the type of school the individual attended is recorded somewhere? I can see from the data that there is vocational, community/comprehensive or secondary but is there any way of knowing whether their school was an Irish Medium school or just a normal curriculum school?

A: Whether the school was Irish-speaking or English-speaking was not routinely collected as part of the School Leavers Survey.  The researchers noted that the number of students in Irish-speaking Schools in each cohort would be too small to provide meaningful results.

Q. I presume that the exam results reported relate to the the last exam sat which is recorded in q8afix (?). The results have subject level grade and year.  I am interested in just leaving cert results so I was picking q8afix = 3 or 5. There seems to be multiple years for some people, does mean that they may have repeated their leaving cert as sometimes there are two successive years of results. 

A: Yes - the results from repeat years are available for some people. The results provided are from the highest level exam taken.

Q. There is a variable typexam which codes 1 as jc only, 2 lc only 3 lca only 4 jc +lc, etc. I am unclear what this variable means.

A: This refers to the types of exam taken. JC=Junior Cert; LC=established Leaving Cert; LCA=Leaving Cert Applied; JC+LC means both JC and LC results are available. Results are provided (where the student agreed to this) for the highest level exam taken.

Q. I wanted to check also, there are three versions/spellings  for subject variable,  Subject, Subjec  subjec   .     Subject Subject2-19,   Subjec10-11  subjec12-19, Is this just a typo or are these from different exams?

A. These are just different variable names, all referring to the subject taken in the highest level exam.

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