Longitudinal Research And Cross-Sectional Research

In order to study how people do or don’t change over a period of time, researchers have to conduct a series of researches. Those researches being a cross-sectional research, longitudinal research, and a cross-sequential research. In cross-sectional research the study involves looking and comparing people who differ in a key characteristic being age but are similar in many other important characteristics. Cross-sectional research is beneficial because researchers can collect a great amount of data in a quick period of time and it is very inexpensive to do. Weaknesses of cross-sectional research is that it is difficult to ensure that the large group being compared share similarities in every other thing besides age. Also cross-sectional research cannot determine causal relationship. Longitudinal research is a study that involves following a group of …show more content…
The difference in age is the cross-sectional component and following them over a course of time is the longitudinal component. This study is constructive because it allows researchers to compare different groups over a wide range of ages as well as comparing an age group to that same age group from years ago (Berger, 2014). This form of research would more than likely have the same disadvantages as longitudinal and cross- sectional. A longitudinal study that could be conducted is determining whether children who are involved in extracurricular activities make better grades than those who do not. As a longitudinal study, researchers can take a group of 200 high schoolers who are involved in extracurricular activities and a group of 200 who are not and follow them from the time they enter high school to the time they graduate high school. In their senior year after graduation you could take the average GPA from both groups. The group that has the higher average could be who the researchers base their conclusion