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Conducting Longitudinal Research: Practical lessons from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health
Deborah Loxton, Julie Byles, Annette Dobson, Wendy Brown (Eds)
ISBN: 978-0-9775742-9-2 2007 eContent Management
Susan Donath
Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute; Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC
The International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches is:
"an international peer-reviewed journal for timely publication of research, scholarship, educational, researcher and practitioner perspectives on multiple, hybrid (outcome of unusual blending), synergistic (combined effect), integrated and cultural research approaches. The focus is on combining or synergizing various theoretical frameworks, methodologies and methods most appropriate for addressing research questions."
Since the Journal's focus is not primarily on health research, I doubt that the contents of this journal would generally be of interest to AEA members. The current issue, however, is devoted entirely to papers on practical issues relating to longitudinal (health) research, using the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH) as a case study. Given that the ALSWH uses a standard quantitative research approach, it is not quite clear how this issue fits with the stated objectives of the Journal, but for researchers embarking on a quantitative longitudinal health study, the papers in this issue contain much useful practical information not easily obtained elsewhere.
The topics covered by the papers include: Human resources for longitudinal studies, protocols for accessing and disseminating longitudinal data, longitudinal survey development and design, recruiting for a longitudinal study, developing reiationships and retaining participants in a longitudinal study, developing and maintaining participant databases in longitudinal studies, data management issues, working with longitudinal data (attrition and retention, data quality, measures of change), conducting substudies, and communication and dissemination of findings.
In an ideal world, all researchers planning a new longitudinal study would aiready have already gained a detailed knowledge of the practical issues through working on, or being involved with, previous longitudinal studies. In practice, because there have been few large-scale community based longitudinal studies in Australia, many researchers embarking on a longitudinal study do so for the first time. In addition, successful longitudinal studies retain staff over a long period, so many experienced researchers may only work on one or two studies in their research careers.
This collection of papers is a valuable source of practical information on the main aspects of longitudinal studies. The papers on data management are particularly useful. This aspect of study design is often somewhat overlooked during the planning stage, but is absolutely critical for a successful study. In a longitudinal study it can be difficult to obtain good quality ongoing data (maintaining contact, keeping response rates high, getting the next survey out in a timely manner) at the same time as making the data already collected available to researchers either in the team or elsewhere.
Retention of study participants is a major challenge for longitudinal studies and several papers offer useful information on this topic. As the paper by Young, Powers and Wheway details, study retention in the ALSWH cohort of younger women has not been high (around 64% by Wave 3), due mainly to inability to make continued contact with participants. It is a little disappointing that the authors do not suggest, with the benefit of hindsight, additional steps that subsequent studies might take to ensure study retention in studies ofyoung adults. Overall, however, I would recommend this collection of papers to any researcher planning or conducting a longitudinal study.
References
Donath S (2008) Conducting longitudinal research: Practical lessons from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health - Book Review. Australasian Epidemiologist 15: 26.
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