Abstract
Studies have emerged that use qualitative techniques to collect and analyze data on subjects followed over time. But due to the novelty of this approach, a codified methodology underlying longitudinal qualitative research is underdeveloped. This article focuses on one method of longitudinal qualitative research, the longitudinal qualitative interview (LQI), to: 1) account for its origin and epistemology, and; 2) delimit the parameters within which LQIs are successfully conducted, using an example from the author’s studies of careers. LQIs are conducted with the same people over a time period sufficient to allow for the collection of data on specified conditions of change. They are also an important means by which to study how people experience, interpret, and respond to change. Accordingly, they are a prime means to study development at individual, group, and societal levels. While the foundation of LQIs is traceable to a long history, their robust application belongs to an as yet unrealized future.
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Notes
Even in the most recent handbook of longitudinal research (Menard 2008), only one of the thirty-eight chapters is devoted to qualitative research.
A partial exception is Clausen (1993), who began his investigation into the patterning of lives from the Berkeley longitudinal studies in 1928. The subjects were followed annually through the 1930s, and then at subsequent intervals up to the 1990s. A combination of survey and interview data were collected at these times. Sixty men and women were selected for in-depth life history interviews for American Lives, and six of these individuals form chapter-length vignettes. The book blends quantitative and qualitative data, with arguably more emphasis placed on quantitative analysis, instruments, and measures. It does not contain an account of the qualitative procedures employed across the decades of the project.
While LQR remains young in application, researchers in Great Britain have to-date been the most active in establishing a beginning foundation of empirical studies (Corden and Millar 2007a; Thomson and Holland 2003). Comments by Thomson et al. (2003, 185) in a special issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, devoted to longitudinal approaches, underscore this point: “The origins of this special issue lie in a combination of excitement and anxiety: excitement that we were working with promising new methodology and anxiety that this was taking place without a relevant literature to inform and debate the epistemological or practical decisions we were making.” Corden and Millar (2007b), make similar observations in a special section of Social Policy and Society. Saldana’s (2003) book-length discussion, focused on observation, arguably remains the most sustained treatment.
“Who will see that all past time is driven back by the future, that all the future is consequent on the past, and all the past and future are created and take their course from that which is ever present?” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, Book 11, Chapter 11).
The Polish Peasant is at once cast as a monument in its time and subsequently overlooked. Thomas’s abrupt firing by the University of Chicago president in 1918, related to an arrest at a downtown hotel where Thomas was charged with “interstate transport of females for immoral purposes” and false hotel registration, did not help the work’s reception or the author’s scholarly legacy. The president even directed the University of Chicago Press to abandon publication of the book; it was rescued by a Boston publisher. By 1948, Shils criticized sociologists for neglecting the work and called Thomas into a company of great sociological thinkers: “Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto, in whose class he surely belongs” (Shils 1948, 26, note 33; also quoted in Bulmer 1984, 45). By 1969, Nisbet called The Polish Peasant “the greatest single study done thus far by an American sociologist,” and argued that “had American sociology managed to follow in the lines of guidance contained in this remarkable work, it would not be so largely lost today in its tortuous and too often vapid categories and concepts related to social systems and their assorted properties” (Nisbet 1969, 326; also quoted in Zaretsky 1984, 31). Years later still, in words not far off from Nisbet’s, Shils returned to his point in a biographical account of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the subsequent Chicago president who tried unsuccessfully to bring Thomas back to the University: “Thomas was at the time of his dismissal at the height of his intellectual powers. He was with Robert Park the most outstanding sociologist in the United States and one of the most outstanding in the world. He still remains in that category despite the passage of years and the multitudes of busy sociologists” (Shils 1991, 195).
In qualitative research, sample size is typically established through theoretic sampling until a saturation point is reached (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Morse 2007). There are trade-offs in the size and composition of all samples. The point here is that LQR, like qualitative work in general, seeks to generalize on analytic dimensions that establish a framework by which to authentically interpret a group, setting, or situation. This objective tends to require a sample greater than one, since analytic dimensions are likely to emerge more readily amidst a plurality of subjects. And it tends to require a sample smaller than the samples customarily found in survey research, since the aim is not statistical generalization. Specific sample size is answerable by the aims of the given research, in the context of these guiding principles (Small 2009).
Apted’s is not an academic study but rather a visual documentary. Academic social scientists and documentarians (including journalists) subscribe to different conventions of practice and ethical codes in their work. These caveats in mind, Apted’s work may be fruitful for illustrative and comparative purposes in academic matters, just as some academic work may be relevant to the practitioner outside of academe.
Had I encountered other negative reactions, I would have likely drawn different conclusions. Depending on the substance of the reactions, I might have adjusted communication procedures with my subjects.
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at the Eighth International Conference on Social Science Research Methodology, Sydney, Australia. The author thanks Alice Goffman, four anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their valuable insights and comments.
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Hermanowicz, J.C. The Longitudinal Qualitative Interview. Qual Sociol 36, 189–208 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-013-9247-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-013-9247-7