strength and weaknessess on longitudanal study on a child. (childcare course)?

Strengths::

1. Data is collected as the child develops rather than asking people what they remember e.g. if you ask people to think back and tell you about their childhood, they will remember little with clarity.

2.Picks up long-term changes e.g. the effects of parental divorce may only become evident after many years.

Weaknesses are:

1. It takes a long time to collect data so research is expensive to carry out.

2. Sample size needs to be large and accurate to carry out study on a group that represents the whole population (every type of child) - otherwise it will tell you about just a few or even one child and you can't draw conclusions about larger groups.

3. Subject attrition - children might drop out of the study for many reasons and you could find that particular groups are under-represented in the complete study.- you can't apply your conclusions to all 10 year olds if large numbers of the boys had stopped taking part for some reason.

Those are the major strengths and weaknesses to a longitudinal study.