Читать книгу Child Psychology - Jean-Pascal Assailly - Страница 27

Continued participation is essential for the validity of longitudinal studies, such as ABCD, where families are asked to participate in the study throughout the 10-year period.

This therefore means communicating with families every six months by phone and annually in person, and more closely with youth in person as they transition into adolescence.

Moreover, while it is possible to lose a fraction of the subjects, the risk to ongoing validity is mainly non-random loss, which is sometimes not immediately perceived by the experimenters.

When a socioeconomic or sociocultural subgroup becomes progressively underrepresented, the results of the study are no longer generalizable to those subgroups. Similarly, the most at-risk families may be the ones most easily lost to the study, which will compromise the usefulness of the study for these populations.