Abstract:
The scope of disciplinary activity brought to bear on child development is vast. The range of scholarly interest includes: psychology, biology, sociology, economics, demography, history, medicine, education, politics, philosophy and anthropology, to name but a few. All of these disciplines have one or more sub-specializations (e,g., medicine: paediatrics) representing an entire body of specialized knowledge about children and their development. This development is about growth and change in the early epochs of the life course - its prompts, facilitators and constraints. Of the methods to to study developmental change, longitudinal methods are some of the most powerful. These methods employ repeated measures on the same subjects over time. Depending on the nature of the study and its aims, the time course for observing and measuring this change may vary from brief to extended periods that span years and lifetimes.
The conduct of longitudinal research in early childhood is the focus of this chapter. This focus moves the content away from a potentially vast methodological presentation of strategies, designs and statistical techniques to a narrower set of over-arching considerations that are often not immediately apparent in the creation and operation of studies with longitudinal designs. These considerations include specifying the nature of developmental outcomes of interest to the study, anticipating and implementing measures of change, distinguishing sources of variation and making inferences about them, analytic approaches and capacities, and aspects less often written about such as study governance over time. They impact on the decisions made, not only about the creation and conduct of a proposed longitudinal study, but on a researcher's participation in, and use of, data from an existing or current longitudinal study.