The Components of Change

Thus far we have considered change and its determinants from an explicit causal modeling perspective. At times, though, it is of interest to have simple descriptive statistics to describe change in the sample as a whole, irrespective of how that change was caused. Here one is concerned with such questions as how much change has occurred, whether all members of the sample have experienced change uniformly, and how much of the change in individual positions is governed by their initial position. We will review several different approaches to these problems in this chapter.