Longitudinal

• Longitudinal - a study of a group of people over time looking for the changes over time.
• Advantages - They allow researchers to see social changes over a long period of time. They can record lifetime social changes. It helps the researchers ability to look in detail at the relationships between socio-economic class and participants educational achievements.
• Advantages - Researchers will be able to find any childhood influence on the participants' adult behaviour, researchers can then have the opportunity to research as to why some people are stuck living in poverty while others are able to escape living in poverty. They can be used to monitor changing social attitudes/behaviour over a period of time.
• Disadvantages - Longitudinal studies are relatively expensive as they are done over a long time period. Being involved in the longitudinal survey may influence the behaviour of participants and they may behave differently compared to if they weren’t being studied. The researcher may have issues trying to keep in contact with the participants over a period of time. Some of the participants may not want to participate in the study as they might change their mind as they get older.
• Disadvantages - Participants can stop being a part of the research at any time for lots of different reasons such as ill health, death or they might just not want to be a part of the study anymore. Having a lot of participants drop out can make the research less representative of the population. If the research collected is not representative it can be impossible to generalise society just from their research. As the participants know that they are being observed they may change their behaviour throughout their life because of the study.