What justifications can I use for a ten-year trend qualitative analysis?

Think it depends on your research problem in hand, research objective(s) & research question(s). Other considerations / justifications include:

What justifications can I use for a ten-year trend qualitative analysis?

Think it depends on your research problem in hand, research objective(s) & research question(s). Other considerations / justifications include:

If deciding from the start that a longitudinal research strategy is to be used. Usually to assess cyclical changes [each cycle is a bundle of years], so assessing activism you can scan three generations of students whereby you count 1-3 (first), 3-6 (second) and 7-10 (third). Enough to assess specific cognitive behavior or mind sets with respect to policies.

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Hi,

Trend analysis, qualitative, has to be systematic too. When considering a period of 10 years, you could divide this period to sub periods, and then check each period according to some coding that you devise, measuring the same elements for each period, so that you could observe the changes occurring during these 10 years. It also depends on the data you intend to use. Is it newspaper reports? or some other source ? You could check which one of the sources you intend to use, provide more information on the subject, and work with it.

Why do you expect to observe changes over 10 years? You probably "know" of such changes / have some idea or notion and want to show them with the trend research. Political, societal, economic changes that "upset" students and lead to + activism? or do you think it is apathy and students are accepting some thing s they did not accept at some prior time? Do you think it might be changes in individuals, such as their psychology or different type of students-- wealthier, more complacent or the opposite- students are more aware of inequalities, come from lower -income backgrounds?

Maybe you will find little of no change?

I also am confused about how you will collect qualitative data from ten years ago, unless you do something like a content analysis on ten years worth of text-based sources such as newspaper articles. If that is indeed your plan, then this is a reasonably common procedure in content analysis.

if the first survey is carried out by an organization that keeps the data properly, a second survey can be done later {5 or 10 years} for purposes of comparison or trend analysis. However, special consideration must be given to charracteristice of the respondetns as to age, sex, education and environment to ensure comparability of the two samples.