Statistical analysis of microdevelopmental data: using latent transition analysis to explore developmental sequences

A key issue in the analysis of development concerns how we conceptualize and measure individual trajectories of change. In this talk I will review some recent approaches to this issue, which are not commonly used in developmental psychology. One of these approaches is latent transition analysis. I will describe how this technique can be used to extract different growth trajectories within longitudinal studies and allow other factors to be regressed onto these trajectories. I will discuss its underlying statistical assumptions and describe the main routines for conducting such analyses on commonly used statistical packages.