Longitudinal studies Flashcards
What are longitudinal studies?
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.
West and Farringdon (1973)
Who becomes delinquent?
> 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.
Lucinda Platt(2009)
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.
