This review summarizes the concept of social participation, the status quo of longitudinal research in stroke patients （quantitative research, qualitative research, and time point selection）, the trend of change （obvious improvement of social participation was observed in the first 6 months, and then the magnitude of improvement was generally milder）, and the challenges （repeated data collection, long time consuming, high cost, high dropout rate, and unable to determine the best research time point）.The aim is to provide reference for performing high quality longitudinal research and conducting targeted intervention on social participation of stroke patients.