Panel Survey Overview
Survey Purpose
Recently, Korean youth are facing a lot of difficulties to design brighter future for themselves due to the aftermath of youth unemployment, increasing classroom breakdown and academic interruption, increasing mistakes through deviant behavior, and insufficiency of leisurely society.
Therefore, it is primarily required to understand the cross-sectional conditions and longitudinal changes such as potential job selection, future career planning and preparation, deviant behavior, leisure participation, etc. of Korean youth and the causes.
Based on the understanding, it is possible to suggest suitable career support measures per their aptitudes and abilities, socio-cultural support measures for less chance of mistakes during the growth phase, and leisure activities support measures to experience sufficient socialization for Korean youth. Youth are process entity in the socialization process, growing from childhood to adulthood, and they tend to change their attitudes and behaviors more compared to the age groups in the re-socialization process in adulthood or old age.
Therefore, to understand the conditions and changes of various attitudes and behaviors during the growth process and to explain the causes causally, it is necessary to conduct a longitudinal study over time rather than a cross-sectional study for adolescents with such characteristics. Until now, most of the survey designs used in research to understand the attitudes and behaviors of youth in Korean society were cross-sectional survey designs. With such design, there has been a limit to satisfying the ‘time order condition to establish a causal relationship’ between events. Moreover, it was difficult to identify and explain the patterns or trends of temporal changes in their attitudes or behaviors. On the other hand, the longitudinal survey design can satisfy the temporal order condition to establish a causal relationship between events, and it has the advantage of being able to identify and explain the temporal change type or trend of attitudes or behaviors.
Method of prospective panel survey design which conducts surveys at least twice or more at different times on the same sample satisfies these two advantages at its best. It is a representative method of longitudinal survey design. It is the most suitable method for this survey which aimed for the purpose of grasping the actual conditions and changes of various attitudes and behaviors during the growth process for adolescents, or for the purpose of causal explanation of the causes.
Therefore, the survey targeted the identical youth selected for the survey subjects among 2nd year junior high school students across the country (follow-up survey from 2003 to 2008) and 4th year elementary school students across the country (follow-up survey from 2004 to 2008), and aimed to establish cross-sectional panel data through a follow-up survey with a method of prospective panel survey regarding the living conditions of the survey subjects such as potential job selection, future career planning and preparation, deviant behavior, leisure participation, etc.
In addition, the survey does not stop at just establishing longitudinal panel data. Rather, to maximize the utilization of the established data and accumulate them as a research result, it intends to promote the generation of academic thesis using the data by opening up the cross-sectional and longitudinal data after the panel survey to professors, researchers and graduate students in relevant fields.
Survey Design Model
The longitudinal research model of the Korean Youth Panel Survey (KYPS) is based on a multiple point prospective panel design that repeatedly examines the same sample at three or more different time periods. In addition, when a sample is lost over time, the basic principle of the design is to maintain the representativeness of the sample by assigning a cross-sectional and longitudinal weight instead of replacing the sample.
Under such principle, a youth group selected as a sample among 2nd year middle school students across the country has been repeatedly followed up for six years from 2003 (2nd year in middle school) to 2008 (1st year after high school graduation). The survey seeks to repeatedly follow up for 5 years from 2004 (4th grade) to 2008 (2nd grade) among youth selected as a sample among 4th year elementary school students across the country.
| 3rd Year Elementary School | 4th Year Elementary School | 5th Year Elementary School | 6th Year Elementary School | 1st Year Middle School | 2nd Year Middle School | 3rd Year Middle School | 1st Year High School | 2nd Year High School | 3rd Year High School | +1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 (Year 1) | p1(1) | ||||||||||
| 2004(Year 2) | p2(1) | p1(2) | |||||||||
| 2005(Year 3) | p2(2) | p1(3) | |||||||||
| 2006 (Year 4) | p2(3) | p1(4) | |||||||||
| 2007 (Year 5) | p2(4) | p1(5) | |||||||||
| 2008 (Year 6) | p2(5) | p1(6) |
Such design of survey model has the following advantages, apart from understanding the cross-sectional conditions:
- First, the design can diagnose the causes of various attitudes and behaviors of youth more accurately.
- Second, the design may understand the trend in cross-sectional changes of various attitudes or behaviors of youth in their growth phase.
- Third, the design may diagnose the causes of degree of their changes.