After the course, the student is aware of the variety of longitudinal research questions, and be familiar with the basic analytic approaches that are suitable to each. Moreover, the student is familiar with the analysis of one selected longitudinal research question.

Longitudinal approaches are more and more becoming state-of-the-art in survey resarch. This is not only because they are superior to cross-sectional approaches regarding possibilities for causal inference, but also because longitudinal datasets are increasingly available, and longitudinal analytic techniques are being continually developed further. Longitudinal analysis is applicable in almost any field of research, but is particularly relevant to research on ageing. In this course, principles of longitudinal research and analysis will be provided so that the students will be able to independently carry out a simple empirical analysis with the statistical software package SPSS.

The teacher of the course is visiting professor Dorly J.H. Deeg