Temporality in Qualitative Longitudinal Studies on Health Experience A Review and Analysis

While the number of longitudinal qualitative studies on experiences of sickness, health and wellbeing has burgeoned, researchers lack the tools to conceptualize of time in our arguments. In this literature review, we examine temporality in different phases of the research process: from the design and analysis through to the discussion and conclusion. We also interrogate the consistency of this temporality across the phases.
Our review draws on four databases and includes an initial sample of 152 studies, of which we reviewed 38 in detail to achieve theoretical saturation. We found four modes of temporality across the studies: interrupted time, phasic time, continuous time and cyclical time. Our results suggest that often temporality remains implicit and is conceptualized inconsistently across the phases of the research process, often lapsing into a more static or cross-sectional approach. We argue in favor of making temporality more explicit in longitudinal studies and in favor of sharpening its conceptualization. Our four modes of temporality can aid researchers to think through this in the design, analysis and reporting of a longitudinal qualitative study. This review is the outcome of the authors’ ongoing longitudinal study on health practices in the first four years of a child’s life (‘Sarphati Ethnography’).