Many interesting social phenomena follow processes of change that are not directly observable but can be inferred using statistical models. The classical example is the development trajectories of infants and children (e.g., height and weight) but many other outcomes are amenable to what are known as growth-curve analytical approaches e.g., career earnings trajectories, area-level change in business or charitable activity.
This short (2 hour) course will outline the fundamental concepts and approaches for estimating trajectories of change for social science phenomena, and includes practical examples and exercises using R and Stata.
This repository houses the materials underpinning a 2-hour SGSSS course on growth-curve models run by Dr Diarmuid McDonnell, University of the West of Scotland. The course was first run on 2024-06-05.
The course programme can be viewed here.
The training materials can be found in the following folders:
- code - Jupyter Notebooks containing executable R and Stata code for the practical lessons.
- data - Datasets used in the practical lessons.
- presentations - PDF versions of the course lectures.
- reading - Lists of interesting and relevant learning resources.
I am grateful to the Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences (SGSSS) for funding this course and its continued committment to high quality methods training for social scientists.
Please do not hesitate to get in contact if you have queries, criticisms or ideas regarding these materials: Dr Diarmuid McDonnell