Population-based longitudinal studies to investigate the role of student-teacher relationships in the transition to school

Longitudinal studies of children have many different purposes and come in a diversity of forms. Perhaps the most famous and familiar is the Seven Up! television series that began in 1964. A group of fourteen British children from diverse backgrounds were interviewed when they were seven years old and again at seven-year intervals. The latest episode is 63 Up (Martin 2019). While Seven Up! was not designed as a research study, it has elements in common with a frequently used longitudinal research design, a ‘panel study’, which ‘typically recruits its subjects at a specific point in time, and then, at intervals, collects additional information on or from them’ (Zubrick 2016: 202).

News clippings about the Seven Up! series highlight a further aspect of longitudinal research, which is to understand change over time. For example, columnist Lewis-Kraus (2019) asks: ‘Does who you are at seven determine who you are at sixty-three?’ His question is rhetorical, designed to attract the interest of readers and viewers, rather than to provide an answer. However, the questions that inform the design of longitudinal panel studies are similar in intent, but far more complex, as will be explained in the following sections.