John R Nesselroade

• Ph D, University of Illinois
• Professor Emeritus at University of Virginia

That standardized measurement procedures are a sine qua non of “good” science is generally not questioned. Here we examine the meaning and use of standardized measurement in behavioral science. Procedures and methods of measurement that have served the physical sciences so well should not blindly be assumed to work in the same manner and with the s...

In the last half of the 20th century, psychology and neuroscience have experienced a renewed interest in intraindividual variation. To date, there are few quantitative methods to evaluate whether a population (between-person) structure is likely to hold for individual people, often referred to as ergodicity. We introduce a new network information t...

HSPQ responses of 1836 male and female adolescents were grouped to produce 42 marker variables, three for each of the 14 factors contained in the HSPQ. Subjects were divided into two randomly equivalent subsamples of males and two of females. The four data sets were separately factored using a multiple group solution. Resulting factor loading patte...

When Baltes explored the relations between general developmental theory and the life span orientation, the several propositions he advanced highlighted a clear need for new analytic methods and procedures (and data) to support apt lines of inquiry. Since then, much has been written about appropriate methods for use in modeling and understanding pro...

The accurate identification of the content and number of latent factors underlying multivari-ate data is an important endeavor in many areas of Psychology and related fields. Recently, a new dimensionality assessment technique based on network psychometrics was proposed (Exploratory Graph Analysis, EGA), but a measure to check the fit of the dimens...

The accurate identification of the content and number of latent factors underlying multivariate data is an important endeavor in many areas of Psychology and related fields. Recently, a new dimensionality assessment technique based on network psychometrics was proposed (Exploratory Graph Analysis, EGA), but a measure to check the fit of the dimensi...

Fostered in important respects by the lifespan movement, the study of behavioral development now places much more emphasis on individuality and plasticity than was the case for many decades. Promising emphases that are becoming more evident include the individual as the proper unit of analysis in developmental research, a process as well as a produ...

Fostered in important respects by the lifespan movement, the study of behavioral development now places much more emphasis on individuality and plasticity than was the case for many decades. Promising emphases that are becoming more evident include the individual as the proper unit of analysis in developmental research, a process as well as a produ...

Primarily from a measurement standpoint, we question some basic beliefs and procedures characterizing the scientific study of human behavior. The relations between observed and unobserved variables are key to an empirical approach to building explanatory theories and we are especially concerned about how the former are used as proxies for the latte...

Reliability has a long history as one of the key psychometric properties of a test. However, a given test might not measure people equally reliably. Test scores from some individuals might have considerably greater error than others. This study proposed two approaches using intraindividual variation to estimate test reliability for each person. A s...

Raymond B. Cattell was born on 20 March 1905 in Staffordshire, England. He was educated in England, where he began his academic career in chemistry but eventually moved into psychology. He received his Ph.D. in 1929. Over a long and very productive career, Cattell managed to keep one foot in the theory of behavior and the other well-grounded in emp...

In this chapter a broad variety of aspects of dynamic systems approaches is discussed, including heuristic descriptions of methodological issues, experimental designs, mathematical models associated with such approaches and, in particular, statistical methods to fit dynamic systems models to appropriate empirical data. The authors start with a brea...

We present an idiographic approach to modeling dyadic interactions using differential equations. Using data representing daily affect ratings from romantic relationships, we examined several models conceptualizing different types of dyadic interactions. We fitted each model to each of the dyads and the resulting AICc values were used to classify th...

Latent growth modeling is often conducted using a confirmatory approach whereby specific structures of individual change (e.g., linear, quadratic, exponential, etc.) are fit to the observed data, the best fitting model is chosen based on fit statistics and theoretical considerations, and parameters from this model are interpreted. This confirmatory...

To model processes we propose merging idiographic filter measurement with dynamic factor analysis. This involves testing whether or not the same latent dynamics (concurrent and lagged factor interrelations) can describe different individuals' observed multivariate time series. The methodology allows fitting, across different individuals, dynamic fa...

This chapter is intended as an update of our previous chapter on “Growth Curve Analysis” (McArdle & Nesselroade, 2003). But here we emphasize the use of the Latent Curve Analysis (LCA) and Latent Change Scores (LCS) approaches using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). We consider some of the many questions that have been raised about this general t...

A new genetic factor model for multivariate phenotypic time series, iFACE, is presented which allows for the estimation of subject-specific model parameters of genetic and environmental factors. The iFACE was applied to multivariate EEG registrations obtained with single dizygotic twin pairs. The results showed evidence for considerable subject-spe...

To emphasize growth rate analysis, we develop a general method to reparametrize growth curve models to analyze rates of growth for a variety of growth trajectories, such as quadratic and exponential growth. The resulting growth rate models are shown to be related to rotations of growth curves. Estimated conveniently through growth curve modeling te...

Theory, research, and application in developmental science share the conceptual and methodological challenges of integrating the study of the course of a person's intra-individual changes and the formulation of subgroup (differential) or nomothetic generalizations. One approach to these challenges has involved building tailored construct representa...

On July 11, 1987, Joachim F. Wohlwill died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was felled by a heart that was no match for his indefatigable spirit or his immutable energy, devotion, and commitment to his family, his work, and his countless colleagues and friends. The life of a man so warm, so connected, and so giving always ends with relationships and w...

Integrating idiographic and nomothetic approaches to the study of behavior has met with success via the idiographic filter (IF) which separates irrelevant inter-individual differences from relevant inter-individual similarities at the level of construct measurement in order to facilitate drawing conclusions regarding nomothetic relationships among...

Many analytical methods are not very sensitive to change because of the difficulty of distinguishing short-term fluctuation from the developmental change of primary interest. The current project investigated one possible solution to this problem in the form of a measurement-burst design in which research participants perform several versions of eac...

Recent evidence suggests that emotional well-being improves from early adulthood to old age. This study used experience-sampling to examine the developmental course of emotional experience in a representative sample of adults spanning early to very late adulthood. Participants (N = 184, Wave 1; N = 191, Wave 2; N = 178, Wave 3) reported their emoti...

Research on human development has leaned heavily on extensions of experimental and differential psychology which, in large measure, entail the analysis of variability found at the group level. We explore issues and implications of more directly promoting the individual as the proper unit of analysis for the study of behavioral development which, in...

This article addresses three issues germane to experimental design and statistical analysis of intraindividual variability such as the articles contained within this special section. First, the time scale of the measurement of a process can have profound effects on the outcome of analyses of the resulting time series. Measurement in time poses spec...

Nesselroade and colleagues (Nesselroade, 2007; Nesselroade, Gerstorf, Hardy, & Ram, 2007; Nesselroade & Estabrook, 2008) proposed an alternative conception of factor invariance that retains key elements of the traditional metric invariance view but also is designed to accommodate idiosyncrasy. This proposal involves using factor loadings as a filte...

Intraindividual patterns of time-lagged relationships among self-reports of worldviews/religious beliefs, self-concept, and physical and psychological well-being were investigated. Participants were older adults (mean age=77years) who were measured weekly covering a total of 25weeks. Dynamic Factor Models were fitted to multivariate repeated measur...

This article presents the authors' response which consists of three main parts. The first involves recapping the general thrust of their focus article. The second part consists of some general points that they hope will clarify issues raised by the commentators that were not made as clearly as they should have been in the focus article. The third p...

It seems that just when we are about to lay P–technique factor analysis finally to rest as obsolete because of newer, more sophisticated multivariate time-series models using latent variables—dynamic factor models—it rears its head to inform us that an obituary may be premature. We present the results of some simulations demonstrating that even tho...

Four methods for estimating a dynamic factor model, the direct autoregressive factor score (DAFS) model, are evaluated and compared. The first method estimates the DAFS model using a Kalman filter algorithm based on its state space model representation. The second one employs the maximum likelihood estimation method based on the construction of a b...

Dynamic factor models have been used to analyze continuous time series behavioral data. We extend 2 main dynamic factor model variations—the direct autoregressive factor score (DAFS) model and the white noise factor score (WNFS) model—to categorical DAFS and WNFS models in the framework of the underlying variable method and illustrate them with a c...

Ideally, the unit of analysis in psychology is the individual. However, many psychological methods do not cope well, either at the level of construct definition or at the level of measurement, with individuality in behavior. There is little leeway for constructs to be both idiosyncratically tailored to the individual, and still identified as having...

The ability to maintain the separation between positive emotion and negative emotion in times of stress has been construed as a resilience mechanism. Emotional resiliency is particularly relevant in old age given concomitant declines in cognitive performance. In the present study, the authors examined the dynamical linkages among positive emotion,...

Paul B. Baltes died in Berlin, Germany, on November 7, 2006, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was probably the most influential developmental psychologist on the international scene at the time of his death. His broad scientific agenda was devoted to establishing and promoting the life-span orientation of human development-an area that he,...

Bayesian methods for analyzing longitudinal data in social and behavioral research are recommended for their ability to incorporate prior information in estimating simple and complex models. We first summarize the basics of Bayesian methods before presenting an empirical example in which we fit a latent basis growth curve model to achievement data...

In the past several decades, methodologies used to estimate nonlinear relationships among latent variables have been developed almost exclusively to fit cross-sectional models. We present a relatively new estimation approach, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), and illustrate its potential as a tool for fitting nonlinear dynamic models in two ways:...

It has been acknowledged that both trait and state contribute to psychological measurements. However, existing structural equation models for disentangling these sources of variability are based on assumptions that are not tenable in the light of empirical results. A new model is presented, termed the integrated trait–state (ITS) model, which both...

The development of personal life investment (PLI) during old age was investigated with longitudinal and cross-sectional data from the Berlin Aging Study (N = 516, ages = 70-103 years). PLI measures motivational energy expended in life domains that require (obligatory PLI) or do not require (optional PLI) investment in old age. The authors used stru...

Recent studies have documented that normal adults exhibit considerable variability in cognitive performance from one occasion to another. We investigated this phenomenon in a study in which 143 adults ranging from 18 to 97 years of age performed different versions of 13 cognitive tests in three separate sessions. Substantial within-person variabili...

Although many studies have examined inconsistency of cognitive performance, few have examined how inconsistency changes over time. 91 older adults (age 52 to 79) were tested weekly for 36 consecutive weeks on a series of multitrial memory speed (i.e., letter recognition) tasks. A number of multivariate techniques were used to examine how individual...

Weekly cycles in emotion were examined by combining item response modeling and spectral analysis approaches in an analysis of 179 college students' reports of daily emotions experienced over 7 weeks. We addressed the measurement of emotion using an item response model. Spectral analysis and multilevel sinusoidal models were used to identify interin...

We are honored to have the opportunity to offer a few words in response to Molenaar's manifesto (this issue) calling for the return of the individual to scientific psychology. His arguments are clearly articulated, strongly supported, and quite timely, particularly given the recent surge in popularity of longitudinal studies of individual developme...

With few exceptions, the dynamics underlying the mood structures of individuals with Parkinson's Disease have consistently been overlooked. Based on 12 partici- pants' daily self-reports over 72 days, we identified 10 participants whose covariance matrices for positive and negative affect were similar enough to warrant pooling. Dy- namic factor mod...

Researchers have attempted to explain age-related decrements in cognitive performance in terms of reduced processing speed or decreased ability to inhibit irrelevant thoughts. We present these ideas in the context of a dynamic model derived from extensions of the classical predator-prey equation. Reduced processing speed among older adults is repre...

As an individual differences variable, lability (within-person variability) has often been neglected even though it has been shown to predict key outcomes such as mortality. We examine intraindividual variability in perceptual-motor performance and relate it to chronological age in a sample of adults. The magnitude of between-session variability wa...

We examine some features of intraindividual variability and the research outcomes from its study. Selected current modeling techniques focused on individual-level analyses are briefly discussed, including some promising applications stemming from dynamical systems theory work. We turn these ideas into issues prominent in the study of behavioral dev...

Interest in the study of intraindividual variability is growing rapidly. The present collection of papers deals with both longer-term, growth and change and shorter-term intraindividual variability. The papers emphasize primarily the former within the context of analyzing large, longitudinal data sets. Also discussed are some key methodological mat...

This article reviews the current status of methods available for the analysis of psychological change in adulthood and aging. Enormous progress has been made in designing statistical models that can capture key aspects of intraindividual change, as reflected in techniques such as latent growth curve models and multilevel (random-effects) models. Ho...