Longitudinal method compared with 5 other methods in text book - Research Paper Example

In essence, longitudinal studies usually allow tracking of people; therefore, different longitudinal surveys given people are less likely to be the true reflection of cultural or behavior different over a given period (Jin and Rounds, 2012). Longitudinal research methods allow observation of changes in a more accurate way; therefore, it can be applied in different fields particularly business field among other fields (Bryman, 2012). Notably, longitudinal studies often allow accurate observation of changes that occur during the study in numerous fields.

In nursing and medicine fields, the study is often designed to reveal the predictors of certain diseases. In marketing, the same study is often applied to identify the needed changes to advertisements due to attitude and behavior changes within the targeted audience. Longitudinal studies are classified among the observational studies; thus, it its application cannot allow the manipulation of variables of the study (Lee and Xia, 2011). In some instances, it has been noted that the longitudinal studies are less powerful to detect any causal relationship between variables than other experimental research methods (Wagner, 2010).

However, due to their repeated observations at individual levels, longitudinal studies are more powerful than other cross-sectional observational studies. Additionally, longitudinal studies are capable of excluding time invariants within the unobservable individual difference, and they allow temporal observation of order of events (Morrow, 2011). Nonetheless, the longitudinal studies are every expensive since they take a longer period to be accomplished; thus, making it less convenient research method.

Additionally, longitudinal studies may lack accuracy since sometimes they experience changes in variables especially in case of death of a particular data set. These underlying differences and similarities between longitudinal research studies allows to compared with