ABSTRACT
In longitudinal research, investigators are often interested in studying individual differences in patterns of change on measured variables over time. Conventional approaches to this problem, along with the vast majority of published applications, have focused on analysis of change in one variable at a time. However, there often exist interesting and important questions involving relationships between patterns of change on different variables. For instance, what is the association between the rate of increase on different measures of physical growth or of psychological development? What is the association between patterns of learning in different domains or on different kinds of tasks? In this chapter, we consider methods for the analysis of multivariate change so as to obtain information about relationships between patterns of change on different variables. This is essentially an expository presentation wherein we review existing methods, illustrate their use, and discuss relationships among them.
