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Sequential Designs

Sequential designs are developmental research designs that include elements of both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies; they are configured in ways to address confounds between age, cohort, and time of measurement. Sequential designs were developed in response to concerns that researchers had regarding conventional cross-sectional and longitudinal developmental designs. Although they originated in the developmental study of aging, sequential designs can be used across developmental periods in life-span human development research. This entry begins by discussing the challenges to developmental research inherent in the conventional cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. Next, the entry explores the way in which sequential designs are conceptualized. Finally, the entry describes the three sequential designs: cross sequential, time sequential, and cohort sequential.

Challenges to Conventional Developmental Designs

One of the problems inherent in developmental research is that when researchers study people of differing ages, those people also differ in other ways. This issue becomes prominent when considering cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, which are considered to be conventional developmental designs. In a cross-sectional investigation, researchers collect data from participants of different ages at only one time point. For example, an investigator who is interested in differences in intellectual functioning across adulthood might collect data from 20-, 40-, 60-, 80-, and 100-year-olds all at one time point, say in June 2015. In a cross-sectional design, age and cohort are confounded. That is, people of varying ages in the investigation also come from different cohorts (i.e., birth years or generations). In an investigation of intellectual functioning, K. Warner Schaie and Gisela Labouvie-Vief demonstrated that when using a traditional cross-sectional design to examine intellectual functioning, age differences emerge such that the younger group performed at a significantly higher level than the older age-group. This pattern of findings suggests that there is a decline in intellectual functioning as people age. However, these differences might be attributable to the younger cohort having access to higher levels of education than the older cohort. Indeed, longitudinal analyses of several different cohorts suggested fewer declines in intellectual functioning, supporting the idea that intellectual functioning, as measured in their study was correlated with educational level.

In a longitudinal investigation using data from only one cohort, researchers are able to document changes across age, which is an advantage over the cross-sectional design. However, in the single-cohort design, age changes, or maturation, cannot be separated from effects due to the passage of time. For example, if we surveyed 18-year-olds about their financial planning before the Great Recession in 2008 and then surveyed them again 8 years later, in 2016, it would not be possible to determine whether growth in financial planning was the result of their experiences with the Great Recession or the result of their maturation into young adults who are likely to have jobs with a retirement plan. Thus, it is not possible to differentiate maturational versus environmental effects using the longitudinal design.

Conceptualizing Sequential Design

As outlined above, there are several limitations that have been identified with cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs. In response to the problems inherent in these conventional developmental designs, a number of scholars who studied aging developed several sequential designs intended to overcome the limitations of conventional approaches to studying aging.

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