Understanding Young Lives Across Time and Space

Youth and young adulthood, as life stages, have an affinity with longitudinal research methods. The idea of these stages of life is often captured through metaphors of transition, and related to dynamic processes of change more broadly (see Cuervo and Wyn in J Youth Stud 17(7):901–915, 2014; Cuzzocrea in J Youth Stud 23(1):61–75, 2020). A growing body of literature on conducting research has emerged, and this work expands on many dimensions of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods approaches to youth longitudinal research. However, this work tend to be situated firmly within a specific study, or to be primarily instructional. As a result, there is little writing on the practice of longitudinal youth research that spans the breadth of methodological approaches (quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods) as well as a range of studies (although see Neale’s (The craft of qualitative longitudinal research. Sage, 2021) excellent volume of qualitative longitudinal methods). It is the aim of this volume to address this area of relative silence. Specifically, we seek to draw together and showcase longitudinal youth research programs across the spectrum of approaches and the research tools they employ. In this chapter we provide reflections on the value and future of longitudinal youth research.