ABSTRACT
Studies of individual change or growth over time pervade the educational and social science research literature, and recent advances in methodology in tandem with technical improvements in statistical software have greatly increased the options that researchers have at their disposal for tracking and describing patterns of change (Collins, 2006; Fitzmaurice & Molenberghs, 2009). Along with this plethora of options comes a corresponding challenge for applied researchers in choosing an appropriate model to represent their data. Unfortunately, neither simplicity nor complexity of a selected model or analytic approach will guarantee its usefulness. Adding further confusion to this situation is the observation that more than one type of model or approach might reasonably describe the patterns in the data. So, what is a researcher to do?
