Structuring and Measuring Change over the Life Span

Abstract

The long-standing topic of how to represent and measure change in behavioral sciences is examined. The authors contend that focusing on change processes such as growth and development intrinsically requires one to operationalize three fundamental and intimately connected concepts--measurement, design, and analysis. In the measurement section, we discuss some historical developments such as initial attempts to obtain "ostensive" characteristics of behavior abstractions, some controversies surrounding differences scores and regression toward the mean, and the various factor analytic approaches offered by Cattell's (1952) data box. The authors also examine more recent measurement schemes, such as multivariate representations of change and latent difference scores. In the design section, the chapter stresses the importance of a proper selection of occasions of measurement, and discusses recent advances, such as planned incompleteness of data and the use of minilongitudinal studies to overcome practical difficulties. Finally, in the modeling section, the authors discuss newer modeling approaches, such as dynamic factor models and dampened linear oscillator models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved) (from the chapter)