The Person-oriented Approach in the Field of Educational Psychology

Individual differences are a fundamental component of psychology, but these differences are often treated as “noise” or “errors” in variable-oriented statistical analyses. Currently, there is a small but emerging body of research using the person-oriented approach. In this paper a brief theoretical and methodological overview of the person-oriented approach is given. A person-oriented approach is often preferable where the main theoretical and analytical unit is a pattern of operating factors, rather than individual variables. In order to illustrate the relevance of this approach to research in educational psychology several representative statistical methods are outlined, two of which employ a person-oriented approach (latent class analysis/ latent profi le analysis, confi gural frequency analysis/ prediction confi gural frequency analysis) and one that combines person and variable-oriented approaches. Examples of data analyses are used to demonstrate that variable and personoriented approaches provide the researcher with different information that can be complementary.