Longitudinal research (or observing the same subject across time) in human development requires more careful planning than do cross-sectional studies and is demanding theoretically and organizationally. This volume focuses on methods of data treatment in longitudinal research emphasizing the importance of careful matching of methodology to the substantive problem under consideration. It deals particularly with concepts of stability and change that are central to personality and developmental research. Contributors to this volume explore the methodology and scope of life span studies in a...

How can the richness of individual lives be captured by the objective methods and statistical analyses of developmental research? Some of the leaders in developmental research pursue the answers to this question in this book. Each chapter is followed by a commentary and discussion by Marian Radke Yarrow.

During the last decade there has been increased awareness of the limitations of standard approaches to the study of development. When the focus is on variables and relationships, the individual is easily lost.
This book describes an alternative, person-oriented approach in which the focus is on the individual as a functioning whole. The authors take as their theoretical starting points the holistic-interactionistic research paradigm expounded by David Magnusson and others, and the new developmental science in which connections and interactions between different systems (biological,...