A half century of longitudinal methods in social gerontology: evidence of change in the journal.

Abstract

With a focus on the use of longitudinal data, this study reviews trends in the quantitative analysis of social science data on aging during the past half century. A content analysis was performed on 227 articles from 12 volumes that were systematically sampled from the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences to examine change in the type of data and quantitative methods used (1946-2000). Cross-sectional analysis remains the single most frequent type of study, but the publication of analyses based on longitudinal panel data increased appreciably over the five decades studied. There was little increase in the use of repeated cross-sectional analysis. Despite the widespread use of cross-sectional analysis, interest in data with more than one occasion of measurement has grown among social scientists who are reviewing for and publishing in the JOURNAL. Given the longitudinal data now available, social science research on aging should give more explicit attention to three issues: attrition, change in repeated measures of independent variables, and models to account for many waves of data.