As sociologists, we are interested in such things as people’s attitudes, labour-market experience, health, domestic work, social class, political beliefs, voting behaviour, income, financial security and material wellbeing. We are also interested to find out about how these things relate to each other and to characteristics such as age, sex, household size and region of residence.
There are many such social surveys in the UK; you are probably familiar with some already. However, most of them record ‘snapshots’: the views, circumstances and activities of people at a single point in time. There are, however, some sociological research questions that are particularly hard to answer using this type of cross-sectional survey. Such questions benefit from the use of longitudinal resources and methods.
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