Assessing longitudinal change in marriage: An introduction to the analysis of growth curves

Current approaches to analyzing longitudinal data in marital research are limited because they make use of only two waves of data at a time, thus yielding incomplete and potentially inaccurate descriptions of how marriages change, The purpose of this article is to introduce marital researchers to the analysis of individual growth curves. This technique uses multiwave longitudinal data to estimate parameters of change within individuals before accounting for variability in change between individuals, A step-by-step guide to this procedure is presented, followed by a discussion of its advantages and implications for longitudinal research on marriage.