Researcher change and continuity in a qualitative longitudinal study: the impact of personal characteristics

The basis of this article is my experience as a researcher on Timescapes Project 4 - Masculinities, Fatherhood and Risk: Transition in the Lives of Men as Fathers. Like all studies in the network the project is longitudinal, aiming to explore the subjective experience of personal change through a textured approach to temporality (Thomson et al., 2002; Neale and Flowerdew, 2003), in our case across the transition to fatherhood. The longitudinal aspect of the project deepens our understanding of contemporary fatherhood by providing a 'long view‘ (Thomson, 2007) as we follow the continuities and fluctuations in men‘s ideals and behaviour over their child‘s early life, both intensively (three times over the first year) and extensively (once eight years later). Time is an explicit element of longitudinal research (Corden and Millar, 2007; Lewis, 2007) as Qualitative Longitudinal Research (QLL) provides the ability to track individual lives through time (Elliot et al., 2008) linking time to texture to consider the intricacies of human lives (Neale and Flowerdew, 2003)