Longitudinal studies: theory and methods

The article reviews contemporary approaches to understanding longitudinal designs as a group of methods aimed at testing a specific class of hypotheses (about change, its functional form and dynamic parameters). We provide a description of main longitudinal designs and point out their limitations, along with analyzing major validity threats specific to longitudinal studies: the critical review of methodological and methodical problems and possibilities of overcoming them is completed by the brief description of the main statistical approaches for analyzing longitudinal data.

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