Social scientists have had a longstanding fixation on moral character, demographic information, and socioeconomic status when it comes to analyzing crime and arrest rates. The measures have become traditional markers used ...
Social Sciences
May 21, 2021
21
539
People in urban areas have a lower risk of developing psychological distress and better overall health if they have more trees within a walkable distance from their homes, a study by University of Wollongong (UOW) researchers ...
Environment
Jul 26, 2019
0
1221
Many American parents yell or shout at their teenagers. A new longitudinal study has found that using such harsh verbal discipline in early adolescence can be harmful to teens later. Instead of minimizing teens' problematic ...
Social Sciences
Sep 4, 2013
9
2
Is it true, that entrepreneurs are a particularly self-serving species with their own moral ideas and ethical principles? Does the type of the entrepreneurial "homo oeconomicus" exist? And if so: what makes him so? Together ...
Economics & Business
Aug 6, 2013
3
0
(Phys.org)—Women are twice as likely as men to use emoticons in text messages, according to a new study from Rice University.
Other
Oct 11, 2012
8
0
(Phys.org) —Probation officers see firsthand the effect age has on crime. Typically, an offender will commit fewer crimes as he or she ages.
Social Sciences
Apr 18, 2013
0
1
If we have learned one thing post-pandemic, it is that there is so much more to learn about the effects of COVID-19 on the population. A study published in Microbial Genomics has brought us a step closer to understanding ...
Cell & Microbiology
Feb 23, 2023
0
30
(Phys.org) —What do all Twitter users want? Followers – and lots of them. But unless you're a celebrity, it can be difficult to build your Twitter audience (and even some celebs have trouble). Looking at a half-million ...
Internet
May 2, 2013
0
0
The widespread use of media among college students – from texting to chatting on cell phones to posting status updates on Facebook – may be taking an academic toll, say researchers with The Miriam Hospital's Centers for ...
Social Sciences
Apr 11, 2013
0
0
A 'Big Brother' data culture in rugby driven by performance management threatens to create heightened distrust, anxiety and insecurity among players, according to a new study.
Social Sciences
Jan 27, 2020
0
23
A longitudinal study is a correlational research study that involves repeated observations of the same items over long periods of time — often many decades. It is a type of observational study. Longitudinal studies are often used in psychology to study developmental trends across the life span, and in sociology to study life events throughout lifetimes or generations. The reason for this is that unlike cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies track the same people, and therefore the differences observed in those people are less likely to be the result of cultural differences across generations. Because of this benefit, longitudinal studies make observing changes more accurate and they are applied in various other fields. In medicine, the design is used to uncover predictors of certain diseases. In advertising, the Communicus System, the design is used to identify the changes that advertising has produced in the attitudes and behaviors of those within the target audience who have seen the advertising campaign.
Because longitudinal studies are observational, in the sense that they observe the state of the world without manipulating it, it has been argued that they may have less power to detect causal relationships than do experiments. But because of the repeated observation at the individual level, they have more power than cross-sectional observational studies, by virtue of being able to exclude time-invariant unobserved individual differences, and by virtue of observing the temporal order of events.
Longitudinal studies allow social scientists to distinguish short from long-term phenomena, such as poverty. If the poverty rate is 10% at a point in time, this may mean that 10% of the population are always poor, or that the whole population experiences poverty for 10% of the time. It is not possible to conclude which of these possibilities is the case using one-off cross-sectional studies.
Types of longitudinal studies include cohort studies and panel studies. Cohort studies sample a cohort, defined as a group experiencing some event (typically birth) in a selected time period, and studying them at intervals through time. Panel studies sample a cross-section, and survey it at (usually regular) intervals.
A retrospective study is a longitudinal study that looks back in time. For instance a researcher may look up the medical records of previous years to look for a trend.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
