Neale makes time an object of inquiry rather than the neutral medium through which research happens. Qualitative longitudinal research is defined as enquiry conducted through or in relation to time, capable of tracing change, continuity, endurance, transition and the lived processes through which individuals accommodate or shape transformation. Its theoretical contribution is to align social theories of temporality with empirically grounded life-course research, refusing the reduction of longitudinality to repeated data collection. Methodologically, the approach values rich, textured and context-sensitive materials generated through interviews, ethnography and narrative methods, precisely because such materials can disclose micro-processes invisible to aggregate longitudinal measures. The decisive operation is comparative return: revisiting lives, relationships or situations makes it possible to distinguish transient variation from consequential transformation. The wider bridge reaches social theory, life-course studies and process sociology. Time becomes analytically productive when recurrence reveals how agency, circumstance and social change become mutually entangled across duration.