RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

9
Surveys, longitudinal, cross-sectional and
trend studies
Introduction
Many educational research methods are descriptive;
that is, they set out to describe and to interpret
what is. Descriptive research, according to Best, is
concerned with:
conditions or relationships that exist; practices that
prevail; beliefs, points of views, or attitudes that are
held; processes that are going on; effects that are
being felt; or trends that are developing. At times,
descriptive research is concerned with how what is or
what exists is related to some preceding event that has
influenced or affected a present condition or event.
(Best 1970)
Such studies look at individuals, groups,
institutions, methods and materials in order to
describe, compare, contrast, classify, analyse and
interpret the entities and the events that constitute
their various fields of inquiry.
We deal here with several types of descriptive
survey research, including longitudinal, crosssectional
and trend or prediction studies. This
chapter should be read in conjunction with the
chapters on sampling, questionnaires, interviews
and data analysis techniques. Many researchers
reading this book will probably be studying
for higher degrees within a fixed and maybe
short time frame, which may render longitudinal
study out of the question for them. Nevertheless
longitudinal study is an important type of research,
and we introduce it here. More likely,
researchers for higher degrees will find crosssectional
survey research appropriate, and it is
widely used in higher degree research (see http://
www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415368780 –
Chapter 9, file 9.1.ppt).
Collectively longitudinal, cross-sectional and
trend or prediction studies are sometimes
termed developmental research because they are
concerned both to describe what the present
relationships are among variables in a given
situation and to account for changes occurring
in those relationships over time. The term
‘developmental’ is primarily biological, having to
do with the organization and the life processes of
living things. The concept has been appropriated
and applied to diverse educational, historical,
sociological and psychological phenomena. In
education, developmental studies often retain
the original biological orientation of the term,
having to do with the acquisition of motor and
perceptual skills in young children. However, the
designation ‘developmental’ has wider application
in education, for example, in connection with
Piaget’s studies of qualitative changes occurring in
children’s thinking, and Kohlberg’s work on moral
development.
Typically, surveys gather data at a particular
point in time with the intention of describing
the nature of existing conditions, or identifying
standards against which existing conditions can
be compared, or determining the relationships
that exist between specific events. Thus, surveys
may vary in their levels of complexity from those
that provide simple frequency counts to those that
present relational analysis.
Surveys may be further differentiated in
terms of their scope. A study of contemporary
developments in post-secondary education, for
example, might encompass the whole of western
Europe; a study of subject choice, on the other
hand, might be confined to one secondary