Longitudinal studies

Question 1

What are longitudinal studies?

Answer 1

A longitudinal study is one that follows the same sample or group over an extended period of time.

Longitudinal can include a collection of numerical, quantitative data over time, but they can just as equally alloq the sociologist to collect meaningful, qualitative data.

Question 2

West and Farringdon (1973)
Who becomes delinquent?

Answer 2

> The study was commissioned through the university of Cambridge and involved 411 working class males born in London in 1953. (Began aded 8-9)
The aim of the study was to describe the devlopment of criminal behaviour in inner city males, and to see how far it could of been predicted in advance.
A longitudinal study was selected as it allowed the researchers to ‘cast the net wide’.
By the time the men reached age 32, the researchers caught up with them.
8 of them had died, and 20 had emigrated permantly.
40% of men in the study had a criminal conviction by the age of 40
Results show the mean age of conviction was betwenn 18-25.
EXAMPLE:
‘Seven up’ the BBC show sees researchers follow the lives of 14 british children since 1964, when they were seven years old.
They all came from different social background, and the aim was to see how a child social class determined how their lives would plan out.

Question 3

Lucinda Platt(2009)

Answer 3

Lucinda Platt identifies key advantages that using longitudinal studies can bring:
Positives:
> It can draw out cause and effect relatinships, what events have happened in a persons life.
> Instead of providing a ‘snapshot of someone life’, longitudinal studies can trace how social change has changed over time.
> Allows the researcher to build and establish rapport with the participants over time, which encourgaes them to be more honest.
> They can be used to check reliability of findings produced by other research methods, this is called triangulation.
Negatives:
> People who take part at the start may give up over time. This may be due to death of refusal to take part.
> The Hawthorne effect may take place, since the people taking part know the researcher is monitoring them closely. (poor validity)
> Positvists sociologists claim that with alot of detailed information, analysis is very difficult.
> A change in a persons attitude may be due to the ageing effect or generational effect.