Exploratory Longitudinal Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling - Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation

Studying change processes in education and the behavioral sciences has been of interest for a long time. Researchers and practitioners in the behavioral sciences are concerned with questions about how individuals change over time (Willett & Sayer, 1994; Williamson, Appelbaum, & Epanchin, 1991). That is, we are interested in the question of how individual change in certain attributes (for example, change of masculinity and femininity among adolescents) is related to selected characteristics of a person's background, family and peer environment, or training. In recent years, the number of models utilized to address questions of this kind has increased substantially (e.g., Collins & Horn, 1991; Aber & McArdle, 1991).