Abstract
I had two primary concerns before opening this book. First, I feared that something would be missing; that simplicity would be championed by disregarding multiple complex dimensions to an issue. My second concern before reading the book was whether it would be accessible to a broad readership. Longitudinal research, as its name suggests, can be ‘long’ and thus can require a great deal of resource. It can also be of interest to researchers at very different stages of their careers, whether they are an established academic or a relatively early career researcher, like myself, who may be building their career one 12- to 18-month academic grant at a time. This context is important. I approach this review from this position. What might this book mean to researchers like me? How useful would they find it? In essence, is longitudinal research a particularly privileged activity to undertake, or is it something anyone could actually do?
This book provides a powerful antithesis to my concerns. If anything, it is one of the many books we need to help researchers understand and articulate the value of the concept of ‘time’, and the way in which new knowledge can involve a slow, gradual, iterative, building up and upon over time. Chapters One and Two do this quite elegantly by introducing some fundamental principles to qualitative longitudinal research and a conceptual discussion of the role of ‘time’. In a climate where metrics dominate many public discourses, and quick, almost instantaneous, specific answers driven by outcomes and outputs seem to rule, this book offers a lexicon with which to encourage us to slow down and think deeply.
Yet, the power of this book strides forward in Chapters Three and Four, because it deals with issues where I think most aspiring longitudinal researchers may struggle: articulating clearly a case for planning or funding a piece of longitudinal research, maintaining research focus and questions of ethical conduct.
Chapter Three centres on the issues of purpose and sampling, with great utility, addressing concerns such as how you can maintain the research purpose and focus over time and how you can ensure you will not become distracted by something else. This is always a challenge for long-term research, and here Neale sets out some ways of thinking and approaching the research questions, design and sampling. Her approach allows for some flexibility, but ultimately helps create frames through concept-mapping and different sampling techniques. In this way, Neale gives the researcher confidence to manage and deal with change in a robust way and not to fear it over time or be too rigid in policing it. As she reflects early in the chapter, ‘Once drafted the guiding research questions are not fixed; they are likely to be refined and polished iteratively as data are generated and the analysis unfolds’ (Neale, 2019: 48). In effect, we are being guided in this chapter quite effectively through the difficult tension of avoiding mission drift on the one hand and ensuring we produce a meaningful piece of research on the other.
Chapter Four considers one of the most complex aspects of longitudinal research: how to maintain ‘ethical’ long-term connections with participants. This is an important aspect which can be challenging as many researchers can scaffold their ethical conduct by the temporary nature of research participation, maybe of just a single hour’s interview. For longitudinal researchers this is not always so easy to do, as researchers follow their participants for an extended period of time, with ethics being a dynamic force which researchers may need to wrestle with at multiple points across a project, especially as they attempt to maintain a relationship with their participants, albeit a professional one. Here, Neale shares and considers a number of strategies with which to do this in an ethical manner. These insights give inspiration and direction to the application of ethical conduct.
While Chapter Four covers aspects of ‘bias’ and ‘skewed’ data’ (Neale, 2019: 70), I feel, given the book’s focus on qualitative research, more discussion of reflexivity could have been weaved throughout the book. This may, of course, reflect my own biases though, which come from my epistemological and ontological positioning. For instance, I am influenced in my thinking by Jane Miller’s concept of the autobiography of the question (Miller, 1994) and hold that qualitative research is deeply connected to ourselves as researchers. Our own stories shape the questions we look to answer and the data we collect in our research. To me, this seems even more important in a piece of longitudinal research where we may be more immersed in our participants’ experiences over prolonged periods, which in turn may carve out new biases, or reshape existing ones, in our research. Thus, it is important to be almost constantly aware of our sense of self and our own biases in generating data.
Yet, overall this is an excellent introduction to longitudinal qualitative research and the trials and tribulations in seeking to conduct rigorous research over time. I would have no hesitation recommending it to a broad audience, both those new to the approach and more experienced practitioners, with the aim of refining and honing their thinking before engaging in longitudinal research.
