Latent Growth Curve Modeling

Latent growth curve models (LGCM) are a versatile tool to model change in individual units over time. The most common application in communication research is the analysis of panel data. Univariate LGCMs describe the change of a single observed or latent variable over time. Multivariate LGCMs include predictors of growth processes, consequences of growth processes, and/or parallel growth curves, which model the influences between multiple growth processes. Latent growth curve models may also incorporate autoregressive terms, and growth mixture models distinguish different growth processes in different latent classes. The entry introduces these different kinds of models and demonstrates their application using publicly available sample data.