A person-centered approach in developmental science: Why this is the future and how to get there

This paper argues for a person-centered approach in developmental science and presents theoretical and empirical techniques to help shift the focus to the individual. The need for a person-centered approach is urgent, because of widespread nonergodicity in developmental psychology: traditional between-individual, group-level statistics often cannot be used to understand individuals over time. Evidence for nonergodicity has been gathered in domains such as personality, emotions, identity, performance and intelligence. This highlights a mismatch between our typical research methods—group-level analyses—and a core aim of developmental science: understanding the development of individuals. The implications are profound. Without insights into within-individual processes, our understanding of development remains incomplete and perhaps even incorrect, which could hinder the design of effective interventions. Many of our developmental theories might need to be adjusted to accurately capture individual-level development. The theory of complex dynamic systems and person-centered simulations offer promising avenues to do this. In addition, many promising person-centered analysis techniques, that typically use long time series of data, are available to enhance our understanding of individual-level development. Together, these person-centered theoretical and empirical tools have the potential to help shift developmental science towards an understanding of development that genuinely reflects individual processes.

Highlights

• The problem of nonergodicity in psychological science is widespread, this highlights a need for a person-centered approach to development.
• Creating individual-level theoretical models is a difficult challenge, but complex dynamic systems theory and simulations can help.
• Person-centered analytical techniques presented in this paper can answer questions on individual development, by investigating the shape of individual trajectories, within-individual dynamics and nonlinear developments.