Longitudinal study

A longitudinal study is like growing a plant from a seed. We plant a little seed and give it water and sunshine every day. As the plant grows, we take pictures and measure how it changes over time. This helps us understand how it grows and what affects its growth.

Longitudinal studies work the same way for people. We choose a group of people and take pictures (or collect data) from them many times over many years. This helps us to see how people grow and change over time, and what might cause those changes.

For example, if we wanted to know how exercise affects people's health, we could choose a group of people and take measurements of their health, such as their weight, heart rate, and blood pressure. Then, we would ask them to start exercising regularly and take those same measurements again several months later. We could repeat this process over several years and see how exercise affects their health over time.

The advantage of a longitudinal study is that it allows us to see changes over time for the same group of people. This makes it easier to see cause-and-effect relationships between things. However, it can be time-consuming and expensive to conduct a longitudinal study, and sometimes people drop out or move away, which can make the study less accurate.