What Is Qualitative Longitudinal Research

Longitudinal Qualitative Research is a relatively recent development which has yet to be fully articulated as a coherent methodology (Neale & Flowerdew, 2003:189), although examples of this style of research can be traced back several decades. There are few books which deal with it in any depth (although see Saldana, 2003).

In this essay I am going to; outline longitudinal qualitative research (QLR); address the main features of it; provide an outline of its strengths and weaknesses; describe its advantages over other forms of research styles; and provide an exemplar of a study which employed QLR research design. What is QLR?QLR embodies a range of mainly in-depth interview-based studies which involve returning to interviewees to measure and explore changes which occur over time and the processes associated with these changes (see Holland et al 2004 for a full review). The approach is particularly useful if one is studying a process which has a notion of a ‘career’ of some sort or which involves a developmental process. For example, I study why people stop offending, which clearly involves understanding the processes by which an individual comes to realise the harm they are doing to both themselves and others, makes efforts to resist their engagement in crime, overcomes stigmas, builds relationships with non-offenders and so on.Similarly, studies of ageing or of other developmental processes (parenthood, changes in structural location such as from employee to retiree) are suitable for QLR. There is currently no definition – nor will there ever be I suspect - of how long studies should last, nor is there any guidance in the literature as to how long the time intervals 2 between interviews ought to be.

It is clear that, depending on the subject matter at hand, these sorts of decisions will need to be left to researchers and guided by their preferences and the nature of their studies. A study of the emotional strains placed on a relationship during first-time pregnancies would, one would imagine, need to last the best part of a year. However, a study of decision making in relation to career choices could last years, if not decades. Nor is there any suggestion that QLR studies have to be predominantly interview-based.Although I exclude ethnographic studies from this review, since these are almost always longitudinal in nature in that most ethnographies involve at least twelve months of fieldwork, there are some studies (e.

g. MacLeod 1997) which have embedded interviews in wider ethnographies and have retuned to subjects in order to complete a follow-up. I also exclude from this review those styles of qualitative interviewing which require repeated interviews for some other strategic purpose (e.g. psycho-analytic interviews, see Hollway & Jefferson, 2000).

In essence, QLR studies often involve the following sorts of research design, although as Holland et al 2004:1 note, it is hard to draw precise boundaries around differing styles of QLR studies:• In-depth interviews repeated at roughly fixed time intervals with the same people led by the same research team; • Retracing respondents from an earlier study originally undertaken by a different research team; • A once off long term follow-up of the lives of a particular group or groups of people.  In this review I am going to focus on the first of these. I make this choice since a) this is where my expertise lies, b) the other research designs are more idiosyncratic and therefore harder to draw firm conclusions from or lessons about in a review of this length and c) some these research designs may become untenable under research ethics guidelines.For example, returning to respondents from an earlier study originally interviewed by a different team of researchers raises questions around who ‘owns’ the data and the right (within reason) for respondents to decide who conducts research into themselves and their lives.

What Are the Strengths & Weakness of QLR?Lets us leave to one side the basic strengths of both longitudinal research and of qualitative research, since QLR embodies both of these traditions in research methodology (readers who wish to know more about both longitudinal research and qualitative research respectively ought to consult other commentaries, e.g. Miles & Huberman, 1994, Taris, 2000, for outlines of these methodologies). Turning now to the strengths and weaknesses of QLR, let us commence with the weaknesses. WeaknessesQLR is incredibly time (and therefore resource) intensive.

This brings with it all sorts of costs. For example, let us assume a study which interviewed people about their experiences of moving to a new city, and then followed them up after six months and again six months after that (i.e. three waves of interviews) .

If one wanted 25 cases who had been seen at all three waves, one might want to slightly over recruit at wave one (say to 30). This would result in about 80 interviews in all. Assuming that each 4interview lasted an hour and a half, and that it takes about six hours to transcribe one hour of taped interview, this represents 720 hours of transcribing work, which is usually billed at about £10-12 an hour, or £7,200 - £8,640 for the transcription alone. On top of this, one would need to budget for travel, possibly for payment to interviewees, staffing costs over the 12-18 months of the project and the cost of buying the tape machine and tapes etc. Already a relatively small and self contained project has started to look quite costly.

On top of this, there is the recognition that change often takes time to emerge, and as such, for some topic areas, some studies will need to be undertaken for years (Holland et al 2004:2).Therefore, the results of any such study may only arise several years after the study was commissioned. A further issue arises of course in this case: a commitment to a QLR study may be as much (or more) of a commitment on the part of the researcher as it is the respondents. If the project is intended to undertake follow-ups several years into the future, then the researcher will, in all likelihood, need to generate and continually regenerate research funds – a further cost in terms of time, energies and opportunities.Like any follow-up or research design in which respondents are returned to, careful thought needs to be given to the design of the research instruments and questions fielded to the respondents.

In most cases in-depth interviews do not feel overly cumbersome, as they provide ample opportunity for both respondents and interviewers to explore new areas within the realm of the interview and are far less standardised than, say, survey questionnaires. Nevertheless, some topics will inevitably be returned to in order to assess the development of issues around the main 5 focus of the study, and here one needs to pay attention to question fatigue. New ways of asking about the same topic may need to be engineered and one eye kept firmly on the production of socially desirable (and seemingly plausible) answers which do not fully reflect what the respondent truly feels.Strengths Built into QLR, and this discussion of it, is the assumption that one is undertaking a prospective rather than retrospective study. This design has certain advantages over retrospective studies.

Retrospective studies can be influenced by respondent’s failure to recall events or the correct ordering of events. They also leave themselves open to deliberate distortions as respondents attempt to imbue their actions with a rationality which they did not have at the time, or non-deliberate distortions due to subconscious suppressions of painful memories.With prospective studies one is less likely to be taken in by such biases, since one as a record of what was said earlier on the same topic. (Of course, this too may have been subject to various distortions, but assuming one can triangulate data with either other records or other respondents, it ought to be easier to detect). Like retrospective studies, QLR allows for respondents to reflection on the changes (or lack of them) which they have experienced since the previous interview.

Given that, during the follow-ups, one will have data relating to the respondent being interviewed, one can ask about specific events, periods or feelings in order to gauge changes in those arenas. For example, one could ask a respondent in a QLR study of the processes of home-leaving how they felt about the prospect of starting to live on their own, and then follow this up by recounting to them their previous answer and 6asking them to reflect on how they feel about having left home. In this respect, the researcher is able to tailor-make follow-up interviews for each respondent and to plan to ask specific questions of them based on their previous answers and experiences. Of course, this represents a further time-cost, but one worth paying for the data it generates. It ought to also be added, that in my experience, reporting to respondents what they said in previous interviews elicits better data.

Often this signals to respondents tat you have taken the time to read and think about the previous interview with them and it does not automatically lead to the respondent simply ‘agreeing’ with their previous thoughts or feelings.The explanations which such ‘disagreements’ produce speak to the ‘internal conversation’ reported by Archer, 2000. Another strength of QLR is its ability to link the micro to the macro, especially during periods of sustained and dramatic change. Social or organisational change, especially if it is dramatic and either takes some time to unfold or the consequences of it take some time to unfold often involves a change in the relationship between an individual and larger social organisations or institutions. For example, a study of the re-organisation of a large firm may take several months or more than a year or so to be completed.

During this time employees’ feelings about the processes of change will follow any number of trajectories, depending upon how the changes are progressing and what these mean for them as individuals. A QLR study of these processes of change would need to understand the employees’ feelings in relation to the macro-level changes experienced by the organisation where the research was based. Of late, and especially in the area of research in which I work (criminology), there has been a growing interest in assessing whether or not a particular intervention ‘works’.7.

 Numerous studies have attempted to assess the extent to which programmes aimed at rehabilitating ex-offenders, diverting ‘at risk’ youths from custody, reducing crime in certain areas and the such like have been undertaken (e.g. Lipsey, 1995, Lloyd et al, 1994). Whist these studies may be in a position to establish if these interventions worked or not, they are not often able to establish the precise mechanisms through which they did (or did not) work (Pawson & Tilley, 1997).

QLR, with its focus on the unfolding of process in time, and focus on processes of structuration (1997: 56) is ideally suited to assisting in this broad body of research (Holland et al, 2004:1). There have been some suggests that, in relation to this, QLR studies can help to develop effective practice as well as effective policies (Holland et al 2004:2).What are its advantages over quantitative longitudinal research? In this section I shall outline the ways in which QLR may be considered to have some advantages over quantitative longitudinal research. Both quantitative research and quantitative longitudinal research have long traditions in social research (see Black, 1999, Ruspini, 2002), and this review is not meant as an attack on this body of research, merely a candid appraisal of how QLR scores over more convention longitudinal research. All forms of longitudinal research and non-longitudinal research too, of course, allow one to situate respondents in time.

However, what QLR offers is the chance to chart and explore how social problems became individual troubles. In this respect it offers a way of addressing Mills point that personal troubles have to be understood as public issues (1959:226). In this respect, QLR (as noted above) allow one to link macro-level processes or events to the lives and circumstances of individuals. True, quantitative 8longitudinal research offers this possibility too, albeit for groups or aggregations of people rather than specific individuals. Building on the observation that QLR allows the researcher to chart not just if a programmed-intervention works or not, but also why it worked or failed to work, QLR scores over quantitative longitudinal research in that it allows one to explore contexts, mechanisms and outcomes at the individual level. Although one is often interested in groups of like cases when one is exploring whether or not a programme works, researchers will need increasingly to specific why a programme worked and for whom under which circumstances (Pawson & Tilley, 1997).

This requires a consideration of how particular processes work ‘on the ground’, and this is often best served by QLR. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ways in which emotions shape human experience and unfold over time. Whilst quantitative research may be able to measure (and therefore chart changes in) some quasi-emotions such as trust or perceptions of legitimacy, other human emotions such as embarrassment, hope, loving feelings towards another and so on are far harder emotions to measure using survey questions. Furthermore, subtle changes in emotions, sudden, short-lived emotional states or (to respondents) the unique nature of their emotions are not suited to exploration using quantitative measures (Henwood & Lang, 2003:49). Therefore, QLR allows one to explore these sorts of emotions and how they alter over time in relation to other aspects of a respondent’s more fully than quantitative data analyses might.

9Finally, this being a discussion (in part) about quantitative studies, a note about numbers. Quantitative studies rely on numbers for critical purpose: without a certain number of cases various statistical tests are invalid, and, of course, there are per unit cost savings to be made with larger survey samples. However, this limits the sorts of topics explored (and therefore the sorts of knowledge generated). In a study with a sample of 2,000 cases, the five cases that have experienced rare but theoretically interesting or enlightening events will be dropped from analyses. However, often rare events and experiences can tell us about other processes which we might either have neglected to foresee or which have only just started to emerge in the lives of the population.

QLR better allows for the capturing of these experiences. What are its advantages over qualitative research?In this section I shall outline the ways in which QLR may be considered to have some advantages over qualitative research. Qualitative research has a long tradition in social research (see Miles & Huberman, 1994), and this review is again not meant as an attack on this body of research. In this section I seek merely to provide a candid appraisal of how QLR scores over more convention qualitative research. Most studies which rely on qualitative data involve the strategic sampling of cases who share same characteristic.

Studies are undertaken of a host of areas of social research or social policy concerns.However, rarely are these respondents returned to as assess the ways in which their lives, emotions and beliefs have changed over time or why this might be the case. This is not, of course, to suggest that such studies would be improved if they returned to the field and revisited respondents, but merely to highlight the fact that often qualitative studies are limited to what could be described as ‘contextualised snapshots of processes and peoples’. If more qualitative 10 researchers returned to members of their samples we might find that we had a greater understanding of the following: • the impacts of a particular intervention (e.g.

probation supervision or health care initiatives) on the lives of those selected for it; • how and why respondents’ feelings and thoughts about an issue change over time (e.g. attitude changes brought on my social or geographic mobility, see Prewitt et al, 1966, Glaser & Gilens, 1997, Pratt et al, 2003); • the role of multiple causal factors in complex systems (e.g.

decisions about how to provide care for elderly relatives).