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Panel studies, undertaken with grandiose plans and high hopes, frequently fail to live up to the expectations of the initiators of the research. Practical problems, such as continuity of personnel, institutional commitment, funding, design and substance of the data bank, and changing of facilities and equipment may interfere with the success of the project. The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the pitfalls that may be encountered in such longitudinal studies and to suggest ways in which the researchers' awareness of these hazards may facilitate planning to circumvent some of the difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing data from a seven-year longitudinal study of high school graduates, this paper focuses on the careers of girls who planned to become and/or eventually became elementary and secondary school teachers. The concern of the paper is the way in which factors such as socioeconomic status background, rural-urban residence, measured intelligence, time of occupational choice, level of education, marital status, and husbands' occupational status are related to recruitment to teaching and to retention in the teaching profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research was supported by a Dissertation Research Grant, a Summer Research Fellowship, and Grant GP-4825 from the National Science Foundation. Brown University Provided additional assistance through a University Fellowship.The authors indebted to these two Institutions and to Philip Sagi and Ralph B. Ginsberg for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of one phase of a longitudinal study of some 4000 young adolescents. Early in 1947 the authors designed a project intended to obviate some of the difficulties found in research studies undertaken to reveal how adjusted and maladjusted persons differ in personality characteristics. In general, the majority of such studies have tended to relate the background of the deviant or the maladjusted to the personal or behavioral difficulty alter his maladjustment has occurred. Thus, much of what is known about the factors supposedly indicative of probable maladjustment is derived from a reconstruction of the developmental histories of deviant persons only. The reliability of such reconstructions is dependent upon a variety of circumstances beyond the control of the investigator. In order to keep at a minimum problems of interpretation and classification of data, it was decided to employ a personality inventory of known reliability and validity to collect Personality data. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was the instrument chosen.

Fifteen years after 270 persons 60 years of age and over were first studied in a multidisciplinary longitudinal study of aging, 83 panelists were available for a sixth observation. In an investigation of the relationship between self and physicians' assessment of general health status the following was demonstrated: (1) There is a persistent, positive congruence of the two types of health ratings. (2) Whenever there is incongruity the tendency is for the individual to overestimate his health. (3) There is a substantial stability of both types of ratings through time. (4) The self health rating tends to be a better predictor of future physicians' ratings than the reverse. (5) Self-ratings of health have utility as a measure of health in survey research when objective measures are not feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to authors, the aim of their work was not to construct a theoretical explanation for the differentiation of urban sub-areas. Duncan herself has indicated that such an explanation would require a longitudinal analysis of areal change. Their research compared a series of empirical regularities that were observed in U.S. cities in 1940 and 1950. In their 1958 report, the bulk of their analysis was concerned with seven generalizations, all of which still stand after researcher Beverly Duncan's comments. Their 1958 report indicated that the generalizations showed less consistency between cities in 1950 than in 1940. While Duncan has implied by her quotations of their 1958 report that these generalizations were a basis for speculation, an explanation of the remainder of the quoted paragraph indicates that the comments were in the form of guidelines for further research, rather than hypotheses or assumptions. Duncan implies that they have confused individual and areal data. A re-reading of both the 1950 and 1958 articles clearly shows that the concern of their research was with population aggregates rather than with individuals.

This article discusses the development of aggression. Most of our knowledge of early aggression as it relates to later development comes from retrospective analysis of extreme groups. Several longitudinal studies concerning the stability of such behavior over time are reported in the literature. Sears (196) found that the aggressive preschool boys in the Sears (1957) study had experience high permissiveness and punitiveness tended to exhibit prosocial aggression in early adolescence; those boys who had experienced high permissiveness and low punishment exhibited antisocial aggression in early adolescence. Kegan and Moss (1962) reports stability of aggression in males over time. Specifically, those forms of aggression most congruent with sex role standards tended to be predictive of similar behavior in adolescence and adulthood.

This article discusses the experimental conditions made by the researchers and describes relative motion in bone conduction involving translation and compression components in audition theory. Research in education and rehabilitation needs to be aimed more toward basic considerations. It has neglected problems of methodology. Moreover, an exhaustive, rigorously controlled evaluation of educational facilities on a nationwide basis is needed. Longitudinal studies beginning with discovery of hearing loss and terminating in adulthood should contribute to understanding of the adjustment process at different critical levels. Research in progress on development and deviant behavior of the deaf should be accelerated. Related research, including investigation of communication methods, should clear away the fog of preconceptions and is imperative.

In longitudinal data for the decade 1957-67, the socioeconomic achievement of white metropolitan native mates from five religio-ethnic backgrounds is examined. Jews, regardless of ethnic ancestry, attain higher levels of education, occupation, and income than all other sub- group; while Roman Catholics of Italian and Mexican heritage achieve the lowest levels. Controlling statistically for social origins reduces the gross differentials by about one-third; no net effect of religio-ethnic affiliation remains during the ten-year period after both social origins and prior achieved statuses are controlled. Thus, there is no evidence of occupational and income discrimination on purely religious or ethnic grounds. Contrary to current emphasis in the social psychology of religio-ethnic achievement, achievement-related work values and motivations of adults are neither key intervening variables nor do they influence the Process of stratification to a substantial degree. The most important variable in explaining the differential socioeconomic achievement of the religio-ethnic subgroups is education, alter the variation owing to the handicaps and benefits of social origins has been removed statistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Society persists despite the mortality of its individual members, through Processes of demographic metabolism and particularly the annual infusion of birth cohorts. These may pose a threat to stability but they also provide the opportunity for societal transformation. Each birth cohort acquires coherence and continuity from the distinctive development of its constituents and from its own persistent macroanalyic feaures. Successive cohorts are differentiated by the changing content of formal education, by peer-group socialization, and by idiosyncratic historical experience. Young adults are prominent in war, revolution, immigration, urbanization and technological change. Since cohorts are used to achieve structural transformation and since they manifest its consequences in characteristic ways, it is proposed that research be designed to capitalize on the congruence of social change and cohort identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of the reputational technique for studying community power have suggested that such phenomena as status, formal leadership, or a narrow scope of influence are measured rather than general influence. The technique has been questioned as to its reliability over time and as to the evidence of a relationship between the reputation for general influence and the actual exercise of power in a broad range of community decisions. These questions are examined in the light of data gathered from six Southwestern and Mexican communities. The data suggest that the reputational technique provides a measure of perceived general influence apart from the alternative phenomena mentioned above, that it is reliable over time, and that at least sociometric leaders among the reputed general influentials are deeply involved in general community decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of a study which investigated the eruption of permanent teeth in children. An overview of related previous research is provided, along with details of the study's longitudinal protocol. It was found that molars were typically the first to erupt, between 10 and 11 years of age.

This article presents information on the academic growth of African American and white students who attended the same high schools and were enrolled in the same curricula in the U.S. It also investigates the relationship of a measure of socioeconomic status (SES) to academic growth. Few longitudinal studies of Negro and white patterns of intellectual growth have been reported. One such study in 1980 compared the arithmetic and reading skills and mental maturity of white and African American children in a southeastern state. On all measures, the African American students were below the white students at the sixth-grade level and the gap increased from the sixth to the tenth grade. For the African America group, achievement and mental maturity showed little or no increase from the eighth to the tenth grade. One can only wonder to what extent the educational treatments were equal. Presumably the African American and white schools were separate. Secondly, it is likely that in grades 9 and 10 a much higher proportion of the white students than Negro students were enrolled in academic programs as opposed to nonacademic programs.

The article focuses on a data protection system for assuring the confidentiality of research data in longitudinal studies. Behavioral scientists have long recognized the importance of longitudinal research data in studies of human growth and behavior. A major logistical problem in such studies, however, is that the research subjects must be identified in some manner so that they may be re-surveyed periodically. Although most researchers are aware that possessing identifying information imposes on them certain obligations to protect the anonymity of their subjects, few attempts have been made to develop improved techniques for insuring data security and respondent anonymity. That such efforts are sorely needed is evident from massive anecdotal evidence, and from empirical and systemic studies. The purpose of this article is to describe a system for protecting the anonymity of subjects in longitudinal research and for maintaining the security of data files. A link system has been developed in connection with the Cooperative Institutional Research Program of the American Council on Education.

The article studies the effect of change in the level of human and material resources within each of seventy-three school districts in eastern Massachusetts upon local expenditure for education and local fiscal effort for education. It concludes that metropolitan migration of human resources, particularly of college graduates, had a significant effect on both expenditure and effort. The ability of conventional state grants-in-aid models to counterbalance these human resource shifts is questioned. The use of curvilinear and longitudinal research designs in the study of school finance was stressed.

The article focuses on the temperamental characteristics as predicators of behavior disorders in children. The prevention of childhood psychiatric disorders is a matter of increasing concern, resulting in a corresponding rise of interest in those factors likely to predict such disorders. The New York longitudinal study suggests that a wide range of personality characteristics--high and low activity, irregularity, nonadaptability, intensity, persistence and distractibility--may predict behavior disorders. There is evidence that organic brain dysfunction is associated with an increased risk of psychiatric disorder and it may be that in a few children organic brain dysfunction has an influence on adverse temperamental characteristics. The results of the study suggests that there is a link between adverse temperament and adverse family attitudes and (possibly) relationships. The clinician should now be aware that a growing body of evidence supports the notion that a child, by virtue of his personality structure, requires handling geared to his individuality if he is to stand the best chance of avoiding the development of a psychiatric disorder.

This article presents differences between data derived from cross-sectional studies and those derived from longitudinal studies when discussing growth in humans. While longitudinal studies provide the most information, the cross-sectional studies are logistically more efficient, more easily made representative of the total population, and equally appropriate for many purposes.