Methods for the Study of Development - Developing Methods: Introduction to a Special Issue of Research in Human Development.

This collection of articles explores how contemporary methods interface with and can be used effectively to test developmental perspectives and hypotheses. The authors review some of the latest advancements in measurement and scale equating, multilevel models of change, growth mixture models, longitudinal models of mediation, and survival models and illustrate how these methods can be applied to developmental data. In this introduction, we present the data-box as a useful heuristic for both assessing the conceptual assumptions and implications of a given research approach and selecting the appropriately aligned statistical models for measurement, change, and interindividual differences. Together, the articles provide accessible introductions, illustrations, and discussions of how some of the recent methodological innovations might be applied in the study of development.