Maintaining contact and tracking participants in longitudinal studies |
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| Coordinator 1 | Mr Matt Brown (Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL) |
| Coordinator 2 | Ms Carole Sanchez (Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL) |
| Coordinator 3 | Ms Lucy Haselden (Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL) |
Longitudinal surveys are invaluable for tracking changes over time and understanding long-term trends, but keeping in touch with participants, maintaining their engagement and locating them when they move are all significant challenges. Losing touch with participants is a major cause of attrition. Those running longitudinal studies typically use a mix of approaches to maintain contact. These include “prospective approaches”, used to ensure that contact details are kept up to date in order to minimise the risk of losing touch in the first place, and “retrospective approaches”, used to locate participants when they are found to have moved. Evidence from some studies suggests that increasing concerns about data privacy has reduced the effectiveness of some of the techniques which have typically been used in longitudinal studies to maintain contact and track participants– for example, study members may be less willing to provide contact details for an alternative contact (e.g. a relative or friend) and opting out from contact details being available in telephone directories or other databases (e.g. the electoral role) is increasingly common.
This session provides an opportunity to discuss this challenge and share information about approaches used in longitudinal studies to keep in touch with participants between waves, to ensure contact details held are kept up to date and to track those who have moved.
We invite submissions which describe different approaches used to maintain contact with longitudinal study participants in between waves and to track those who have moved. We welcome submissions which describe new innovative approaches – for example, use of: internet/social media, administrative data, commercial databases, new software and particularly encourage submissions which evaluate the success of different approaches.