Urban Longitudinal Research Methodology; Objectives, Contents and Summary of Issues Raised

This working paper includes ten commissioned background papers that provided the basis for a workshop held at the Development Planning Unit in 2003. The workshop provided a comparative review of a range of approaches taken by social scientists doing longitudinal research in poor urban communities in low and middle income countries. The objectives were to identify shared methodological issues and to establish an informal network of researchers, with the goal, ideally, of being able to work towards cross city results in future research.

These background papers describe research projects that vary on a number of counts – there are both qualitative and quantitative studies, some that are international in scale and some very local, both comparative research projects and studies with a single focus, and they involve a range of disciplines.

Some of the issues considered at the workshop were the appropriate time scale for longitudinal research; the inclusion of data from the non-poor (for instance, those with whom the poor interact); the issue of breadth versus depth; the units of analysis used, the representativeness of small scale studies; issues of attrition and of recall bias; the use of combined methodologies, and various ethical issues.