Longitudinal Methods in Youth Research : Understanding Young Lives Across Time and Space

This book addresses how longitudinal research approaches are used to understand young people’s lives. It elucidates how youth researchers use longitudinal approaches, and how longitudinal research can help us to both understand and shape the field of youth sociology. Chapters discuss the creation of knowledge about youth and how longitudinal research shapes the field of youth sociology and shed light on key tensions and emerging debates in longitudinal youth research ranging from research design to data collection, analysis, and use. It considers longitudinal studies using a broad range of methods, including qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, retrospective methods, and creative and participatory methods. This collection offers insights from longitudinal youth scholars conducting research in Argentina, Lithuania, Australia, Estonia, Canada, the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), Finland and India. These researchers reflect on the future of longitudinal youth research, addressing emerging and prospective issues. This book provides a concise survey of key established and emerging areas of concern in longitudinal research and of the relationship between these areas and the field of youth studies more specifically.

Dr Julia Cook is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include the sociology of youth, housing and money, and her most recent research addresses the role of family financial assistance in young adults’ pathways into home ownership and young adults’ navigation of debt and financial assistance, with a particular focus on buy-now-pay-later services. She is a current Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow (2022-2025), and a chief investigator on the current phase of the ARC-funded Life Patterns longitudinal research program (2021-2026). She is co-editor in chief of Journal of Applied Youth Studies, and was recently selected as a 2022 Australian Broadcasting Commission Top 5 (Humanities) scholar.

Dr. Quentin Maire is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a sociologist researching schooling, education, and young people, with a particular focus on social inequalities. He published his first monograph ‘Credential Market: Mass Schooling, Academic Power and the International Baccalaureate Diploma’ with Springer in 2021. He is currently working on the Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded Life Patterns research program, a mixed-method longitudinal project following the lives of young people in Australia since the 1990s.

Johanna Wyn is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and member of the Youth Research Collective at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and the Academy of Social Sciences, United Kingdom (UK). She leads the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Life Patterns longitudinal research program to pursue multidisciplinary and multi-method research on the ways in which young people navigate their lives in a changing world, with a focus on the areas of transition, gender, wellbeing and inequality.