Products

SurveyMonkey is built to handle every use case and need. Explore our product to learn how SurveyMonkey can work for you.

Get data-driven insights from a global leader in online surveys.

Explore core features and advanced tools in one powerful platform.

Build and customise online forms to collect info and payments.

Integrate with 100+ apps and plug-ins to get more done.

Purpose-built solutions for all of your market research needs.

Create better surveys and spot insights quickly with built-in AI.

Templates

Measure customer satisfaction and loyalty for your business.

Learn what makes customers happy and turn them into advocates.

Get actionable insights to improve the user experience.

Collect contact information from prospects, invitees, and more.

Easily collect and track RSVPs for your next event.

Find out what attendees want so that you can improve your next event.

Uncover insights to boost engagement and drive better results.

Get feedback from your attendees so you can run better meetings.

Use peer feedback to help improve employee performance.

Create better courses and improve teaching methods.

Learn how students rate the course material and its presentation.

Find out what your customers think about your new product ideas.

Resources

Best practices for using surveys and survey data

Our blog about surveys, tips for business, and more.

Tutorials and how to guides for using SurveyMonkey.

How top brands drive growth with SurveyMonkey.

Contact SalesLog in
Contact SalesLog in

How to Perform a Longitudinal Study: Tracking Your Performance Over Time

A survey is like a snapshot: from one survey, you can only draw conclusions about a single time, place and group of people. That's often all you need to know.

But sometimes, you also want to understand how the people you surveyed are changing. In that case, one single survey, or snapshot, is not enough, so we need to repeat surveys in order to track and understand trends over time.

If you want to see how people are changing, this can be done either by benchmarking, which means that you are asking different groups of people the same question over time to see how views change, or by means of a longitudinal survey, which is also the focus of this post.

When you run a longitudinal study or survey, you’re essentially following the same group of respondents over a long period of time, for weeks, months or even years.

This differs from a cross-sectional survey, which is a fancy way of saying that each of your survey respondents only completes the survey once but you might conduct the survey multiple times to collect some benchmarking data (which is your snapshot survey).

But why would you want to run a longitudinal study? Well, just like this study that began in 1968 and still runs today, you may want to monitor changes over the course of your respondents’ lifetimes to be able to draw conclusions from a (very consistent!) group of respondents.

Although running a decades-long study may not be on your radar anytime soon, you can benefit from repeating surveys and tracking changes in your respondents’ attitudes and behaviours over time. (By the way, when you survey the same people time and time again, you’re running what’s also called a panel survey.)

For example, let's imagine that you’re an online marketer who wants to know how your readers will react to a new email newsletter design.

Instead of just sending your readers a survey after you’ve changed your design, send them a survey asking them what they like (and don’t like) about the current design (i.e. create a concept test). You can even use their feedback to inform your newest design.

Then, send them a follow-up survey after you’ve sent them the newly designed newsletter. Since you’re surveying the same people, you can compare their attitudes and opinions about the first design with how they react to the second design and smaller changes will be statistically significant. If you decided to do two cross-sectional surveys with different groups of people, you would need to see a larger change in order to see a significant difference.

If you make more changes to the design based on your readers’ feedback, you can continue to refine your design over time and make sure that satisfaction ratings don’t dip below the initial satisfaction ratings with the first design.

We have millions of qualified people ready to take your survey.

Repeating surveys with the same panel works well when you’re tracking changes in your respondents’ attitudes and behaviours, but sometimes, you’re unable to survey the exact same people time and time again.

In this case, even if you're sending out your newsletter to the same people, you may not be able to capture the same opinions. People may unsubscribe from your newsletter and newer readers may come along.

That’s when you conduct something called a rotating panel survey. All you need to do is gradually rotate a portion of your initial sample out of the panel survey and supplement them with new readers. (In this case, you could easily track who from your email list is completing your surveys.)

This way, your survey will provide a good estimate of the opinions of your entire readership, old or new, while at the same time capturing the changing opinions of the same group of people.

Here are three things you need to bear in mind when creating your longitudinal study:

  1. It’s better to keep the questions identical for all the surveys. Research has shown that changing the way a question is asked can result in substantially different answers, even from the same people, so to examine trends with the most accuracy, you should try your best to ask the same questions in every survey you repeat.
  2. When planning a panel survey, remember that not everyone who responded to the first survey will respond to the second survey. Therefore, if you want to do a panel survey where you survey the same group of people three times and want at least 1,000 respondents for your third survey, you’ll need to survey more than 1,000 respondents in your first survey to account for people who probably won’t respond to your second or third survey.
  3. You need to decide how frequently you want to run your survey. If you conduct surveys too frequently, you could waste your resources and time, since not enough time may have passed for any change to occur. However, if you conduct surveys too infrequently, more people may drop out of your panel survey because they are fed up with taking too many surveys, which means that you’ll have fewer respondents in your later surveys.

When you think about it, the applications for a longitudinal study are endless. You can see whether your new ad actually influenced people purchasing your product or follow up with product purchasers to see whether they’ve enjoyed using your product.

Even though one dataset can shed light only on a single occurrence, the context that comes from repeating surveys over time will help you make informed decisions and improvements.

Woman with red hair creating a survey on laptop

Discover our toolkits, designed to help you leverage feedback in your role or industry.

A man and woman looking at an article on their laptop, and writing information on sticky notes

Ask the right questions on your exit interview survey to reduce employee attrition. Get started today with our employee form builder tools and templates.

Smiling man with glasses using a laptop

Get the permissions you need with a custom consent form. Sign up for free today to create forms with our consent form templates.

Woman reviewing information on her laptop

Create and customise request forms easily to receive requests from employees, customers and more. Use our expert-built templates to get started in minutes.