Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research

Book excerpt: "This edited collection develops three approaches to studying writing through the lifespan: through new insights and methodological innovations, through site-specific studies with a lifespan orientation, and through longitudinal studies that draw on various methodologies to collect, reduce, and analyze data. These approaches resonate with each other, allowing readers to develop a dynamic, interdisciplinary, multifaceted understanding of the limits and possibilities of studying writing through the lifespan. The authors of the chapters in this collection employ methodological and theoretical approaches ranging from autoethnography to longitudinal structural equation modeling. This variety is in keeping with a vision of lifespan writing research as pursuing a complex research object, one that requires both methodological rigor and flexibility, theoretical precision and adaptability"--