Personality Development Collaborative

Looking for some background on the research methods and analytic tools personality psychologists use? Below is a link that will take you to chapters that cover topics such as: conducting a longitudinal study; using archival data; reliability and validity; moderator, mediator, and suppressor effects; factor analyses; structural equation modeling; idiographic analysis; meta-analysis; and more!

To answer your research questions about personality development, you need to select an appropriate longitudinal model. Below are some recommended readings that provide more details about different longitudinal models, as well as examples of how these models are used in practice in personality development research.

Using data from multiple longitudinal studies requires some consideration of how to integrate (or coordinate) analyses across studies. Below are some readings that provide an overview of the integrative data analytic approach and some examples of how personality psychologists have done this in practice.