ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the benefits of considering growth models as change process models and explores the mathematical and theoretical connections between growth models used in ecology for study of fish growth and models of development in humans. Theories of development all promote the idea those human functioning proceeds simultaneously on multiple levels. Innovations in longitudinal study design continually push forward researchers' ability to discover and explain intraindividual change processes and the interindividual differences therein. A wide variety of growth models are being used to study change processes in many fields, including agronomy, biology, chemistry, ecology, economics, engineering, forestry, ichthyology, medicine, psychology, sociology, and zoology. The chapter presents the familiar integrated mathematical form used to describe observed repeated measures data–traditional regression-based model of outputs. It also explores how theoretical propositions about the processes driving intraindividual change are formalized in the differential form–differential equation model of the change process.
