Longitudinal Methods in Youth Research Understanding Young Lives Across Time and Space

Dr Julia Cook is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include the sociology of youth, housing and money, and her most recent research addresses the role of family financial assistance in young adults’ pathways into home ownership and young adults’ navigation of debt and financial assistance, with a particular focus on buy-now-pay-later services. She is a current Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow (2022-2025), and a chief investigator on the current phase of the ARC-funded Life Patterns longitudinal research program (2021-2026). She is co-editor in chief of  Journal of Applied Youth Studies , and was recently selected as a 2022 Australian Broadcasting Commission Top 5 (Humanities) scholar.

Dr. Quentin Maire is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a sociologist researching schooling, education, and young people, with a particular focus on social inequalities. He published his first monograph ‘Credential Market: Mass Schooling, Academic Power and the International Baccalaureate Diploma’ with Springer in 2021. He is currently working on the Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded Life Patterns research program, a mixed-method longitudinal project following the lives of young people in Australia since the 1990s.

Johanna Wyn is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and member of the Youth Research Collective at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and the Academy of Social Sciences, United Kingdom (UK). She leads the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Life Patterns longitudinal research program to pursue multidisciplinary and multi-method research on the ways in which young people navigate their lives in a changing world, with a focus on the areas of transition, gender, wellbeing and inequality.