Repeated measures designs from longitudinal studies are useful methods for examining how traits or behaviours change over time, why and for who. They are an effective method for expanding upon cross-sectional and panel designs and can be used to help improve inferences in fields such as psychology, medicine, epidemiology, sociology, education and public health. This workshop is aimed at participants from any of those disciplines (or others) who are interested in examining how things change over time and why. This workshop would be particularly useful for participants who are interested in Secondary Data Analysis (SDA).
Some examples of different research questions that could be answered using repeated measures designs are:
1) How does depression change over time?
2) Is this different for men or women / those living in poverty or not / those with or without childhood maltreatment
3) Are there specific ages where depression is getting better or worse?
4) Are people who have higher depression during a specific period of time more likely to have other problems down the line?
Of course, this could be income, weight, smoking status or any trait that is measured repeatedly.
This workshop will give an introduction to the methods that are available for answering these questions and show how and when this can be done to answer substantively interesting questions across multiple domains. The emphasis of this workshop will be to give the participant a sense of what is possible with repeated measures data from longitudinal studies, mainly focusing on developmental trajectories (population and group based growth curves). However, this workshop will also include differences in scores and cross-lagged designs, with an appraisal on when some methods are better than others.
This workshop will consist of a series of lectures and practicals (in Stata, SPSS or R). Some experience in one of these statistical software packages is preferred, but could be run in your own time if not. A toy dataset will be provided for the practicals.
Content is likely to include:
1) An introduction to repeated measures and when to use them
2) Various forms of repeated measures designs
3) Linear and non-linear growth + practical
5) Inter-group growth (how growth changes by groups) + practical
6) Future methods for utilising repeated measures
Delivered by Dr Alex Kwong, University of Edinburgh
Required Laptop with either R, SPSS or Stata (but participants can run it in their own time)