Studying individuals across the lifecourse: a review of longitudinal methods

Individual lifecourses have become increasingly complex over the last decades across industrialised countries; this has implications for the way in which we study individuals’ lives. Longitudinal data analysis is widely used within the social sciences and demography and several different methods have been developed for studying individual lifecourses. This chapter provides an up-to-date overview of these methods, which are categorised as either event-based (event history analysis and its extensions and panel regression) or holistic (sequence analysis and its extension, latent class growth models, and latent transition analysis). The authors briefly describe each method and provide examples of empirical applications from previous research. They also discuss the availability of software and software packages to conduct these analyses. The concluding section discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each method and the type of research questions they are best suited to answer.