“Venturing a 30-Year Longitudinal Study”, 2006-05 ():
[Authors: Jack & Jeanne Block; subject account] Longitudinal inquiry has long been recognized as a uniquely powerful method for seeking understanding of psychological development. A 30-year longitudinal venture is described—its theoretical motivation, methodological rationale, and details of implementation. Some novel and implicative findings the study has generated are briefly described.
Common to all the results is an absolute reliance on long-term, widely ranging, independent data. Although specific aspects of the study have appeared over the years, its intentions and scope are recounted only here.
By and large, the organizing constructs of ego-control and ego-resiliency find impressive support in various empirical inquiries, here quickly described.
Methodologically, a number of savvy research procedures useful and perhaps even necessary in longitudinal research are conveyed. The troublesome burdens but ever-alluring attractions of longitudinal inquiry are noted.
A forthcoming website will contain the extensive 30-year longitudinal data bank together with explanatory information. Psychological investigators may find these imminently available data resources useful.
[Keywords: longitudinal, ego-control, ego-resiliency, multi-measure, multi-period]
…We began with 128 children from two nursery schools in Berkeley, California, a heterogeneous rather than a specialized sample with regard to socioeconomic status, parental education, ethnic background, and risk likelihoods. Extensive individual assessments of these participants were conducted at ages 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23, and—most recently but still, importantly, unanalyzed—32. These assessment ages were selected because of our sense of when, developmentally, it would be most relevant to study the participants. At age 23, 104 participants were assessed; at age 32, 94 participants were assessed. The relatively small degree of participant attrition was likely due to the great attention earlier addressed to motivating participants and their parents; to repeated friendly contacts initiated between assessment periods; to our maintaining up-to-date records on participant locations; to our paying the participants a nominal sum for their participation after they entered adolescence; and to our having the prescience to carry out such a study in the San Francisco Bay Area, from which there is a decided tendency not to move.
During each of the first 8 assessment periods, every child (or adolescent or young adult) individually experienced an extensive battery of widely ranging and in-depth procedures, involving 10–11 hour-long sessions at ages 3 and 4, 4–5 longer sessions at ages 5 and 7, and 6 2-hr (or longer) sessions at ages 11, 14, 18, and 23. In the age-32 assessment, besides gathering life information, the assessment necessarily was restricted to using an extensive personality inventory.
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