Listening to the views of children in longitudinal population-based studies

This chapter describes the methods that were developed and used to listen to children in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC; AIFS, 2009), a population-based study investigating the development of Australian children and the contexts in which they are raised. During the early waves of data collection for LSAC, the main sources of information were adults: the parents and teachers of children participating in the project. However, as the study progressed and the children grew older, measures were introduced to access children's own reports of their experiences and perspectives on their personal, social and learning environments. This chapter reviews the ways that children have been included in the data collection and provides an example of how data obtained from children were used to examine a specific research question: What is the relationship between speech, language and communication needs in early childhood (4-5 years) and children's sense of self esteem and social interactions at school (7-9 years)?