Last week's UK Parents Matter conference highlighted the vital role of longitudinal studies in improving understanding of child development. In doing so, it focused on the achievements of Longview , a think-tank charity formed in 2004, when researchers were becoming increasingly unnerved by the lack of perspective in policy making.
Longview was established by a group of scholars involved in some of the more important UK cohort studies. Among them was founder John Bynner, who between 1998 and 2003 was Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, leading the National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort study.
Longview aims to promote the use of longitudinal studies and enhance the methodology behind them. The UK considers itself a world leader in the field and this core group set about promoting the achievements and the value of new life course studies to a wider audience.
Bynner makes a simple case: “Longitudinal studies are unique, as they enable us to predict and to look back across a life to see how what is happening to a person now is related to their earlier circumstances.”
“Seeing how an adult got where they are today is compelling stuff. It gives you leverage over policy makers to do the right thing.”
The drawback has tended to be the cost - and also occasionally the difficulty of persuading government to invest in an approach whose value they may never know, when the politics of the day demand a quicker fix.
Not only are the costs higher because of the time-span, the investment must be proportionally greater to cope with inevitable drop-out rates. But the context has lately been changing in favor of long-term investments: policy makers persuaded by cost benefit arguments may be more willing to consider Longview strategies. [See UK treasury sold prevention with a money-back guarantee and We can’t prevent conduct disorder? Yes, we can]
John Bynner is keen to point some of the other attributes of longitudinal studies, for example their “openness” – the fact that they are not locked into narrow disciplines. The question “how is growing up different, depending on when a child is born?” cannot be answered from the academic point of view.
The belief that true longitudinal study must bring together researchers from diverse fields is also at the heart of Longview’s efforts to improve methodology.
The multidisciplinary modes of study it advocates draw on sociology, psychology, economics and biology. Longitudinal studies also have a strong historical element. This means that they can be used to assess broad trends, as well as giving specialists access to precisely defined threads in the data.
The thrust of Longview’s work is in organizing conferences and seminars to strengthen the links between researchers and policy makers, and vice versa. Researchers can publicize the relevant research at the same time as they catch up on policy priorities.
The charity is also about to publish an open access Journal of Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, which Bynner is editing with support from the UK Nuffield Foundation. “There was a gap in the market,” he explains. The journal represented a chance to promote the work more widely and link up internationally.
As to the future, he says that Longview is contemplating building an international society around the group that supports the journal. The society would bring together the disparate international strands of longitudinal study.