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As the number and scope of longitudinal investigations have expanded, so too have strategies for analyzing prospective data. Different analytic techniques are designed to answer different types of research questions. Person-centered approaches identify groups of individuals who share particular attributes or relations among attributes. They are well suited for addressing questions that concern group differences in patterns of development. Variable-centered approaches describe associations between variables. They are well suited for addressing questions that concern the relative contributions that predictor variables make to an outcome. This special issue includes conceptual essays and empirical reports designed to demonstrate the complementary strengths of these two different approaches. The articles illustrate how the integration of person-oriented and variable-oriented approaches can lead to a more complete understanding of the processes and patterns of human development.
The field of developmental psychology has been profoundly changed during the past two decades by a dramatic surge in the collection and dissemination of longitudinal research. The process has accelerated of late as new resources and new methods have been applied to the collection and analysis of detailed prospective data from diverse groups to provide insight into an increasingly broad array of topics. The trend promises to continue as U.S. funding agencies have determined that large data sets collected with federal funds are public assets that must be shared with qualified investigators. As access to longitudinal data increases, an even greater proportion of our journal pages will be devoted to studies of change over time. Against this backdrop, the articles in this special issue offer a timely look at a topic of long-standing interest: how to wrest an understanding of development from prospective inquiries and indices. Although longitudinal data may be increasingly common, the analytic strategies advanced herein are anything but commonplace. This special issue presents state-of-the-science research that employs and thereby illustrates two different analytic approaches to longitudinal data: the person-centered approach and the variable-centered approach. Together these articles provide a primer, of sorts, on these techniques. Six research teams with innovative, well-established, ongoing prospective studies were invited to submit empirical papers illustrating the complementary strengths of these two distinct approaches. These are supplemented by contributions from two eminent methodologists who discuss strategies for applying and integrating these analytic tools.
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