Discuss the three types of longitudinal research methods. When is each method an appropriate choice of data collection? Discuss the difficulties of each method.
What will be an ideal response?
Ans: Panel studies, trend studies, and cohort studies. Panel studies are studies that follow and accumulate data from the same participants over a period of time. The group of participants is called a panel. The advantage of following the same group of participants relates to the fact that all possible environmental, biological, psychological, or social aspects are taken into consideration. In this way, many possible errors are minimized. These studies are costly and are often limited in size. This type of study suffers from another drawback that is sample size attrition. This means that participants drop out prematurely and do not participate in the second or the third wave of the study. A trend study collects data at different points in time from different participants of the same population. Its main focus is capturing changes or trends of a specific population on a particular issue or concern. The participants relate to each other because they have experienced, been part of, witnessed, or have opinions about the same event or trend. Cohort studies follow the same cohort of people over time. A cohort may include participants who were born in the same year, were married in a specific year, had their first child at a certain time, or bought their first car at the same time. A cohort study follows people in the same cohort for a designated period of time. Unlike panel studies, these are not the same people who are interviewed over and over at different points in time. Unlike trend studies, these people do not share a characteristic or a variable at the time they participate in the study. These are different people from a specific cohort of the population who have done something of interest to the researcher at the same time.
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Based on research using the social distance scale, you can correctly say that U.S. college students today ________
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