Conclusion: Voices from Longitudinal Research

As outlined in Wyn’s chapter at the beginning of this volume, longitudinal youth research has had a close relationship with policy in the UK, US and Australia since the late 1970s. At this time quantitative longitudinal studies were used to trace young people’s experiences of key life course transitions, and to identify those who were ‘at risk’ of failing to make these transitions in socially sanctioned ways. The data collected in this era informed policy that affected the lives of young people. However, it is fair to say that young people’s voices were largely absent from the process of policy development. More recent longitudinal youth research has recognised the value of a more participatory research approach with young people. This is particularly the case within qualitative longitudinal youth research, which emerged as a distinct paradigm at the turn of the twenty-first century (Thomson et al., 2014) and brought with it a strong emphasis on reflexivity and a turn to participatory approaches (Neale, 2021). In this section Aapola-Kari, Armila and Käyhkö consider how qualitative longitudinal researchers engage in reflexive learning with participants, and Patfield, Fray and Gore consider how a large-scale mixed method longitudinal dataset drawn from a project on student aspirations can be used to inform professional teaching practice in a way that represents the perspectives and experiences of the young people who participated in the study. In so doing, each of these chapters grapple with questions about how young people, and their voices and perspectives, can be foregrounded and represented in longitudinal research.