New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research: Perspectives of Doctoral and Early Career Researchers

In November 2012 a group of researchers from British universities launched the methodological innovation network New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research (NFQLR). Funded by the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), the aim of the network was to bring together researchers and practitioners from a range of disciplinary traditions, and at different stages in their careers, to forge ‘new frontiers’ in qualitative longitudinal research (hereafter QLR). This collection brings together reflections from postgraduate doctoral students and early career researchers who shaped and participated in NFQLR network. It presents a sample of our collective process of considering and making sense of QLR in the context of our own research projects. In each of the papers we consider how our participation in the network events and related social media activities have shaped our research practice – encouraging us to foreground temporality in our work, to reconsider what counts as ‘QLR’ or to examine how we document and display ‘data’ over time.