Latent growth modeling refers to a set of procedures for conducting longitudinal analysis. Statisticians refer to these procedures as mixed models. Many social scientists label these methods as multilevel analyses, and the label of hierarchical linear models is used in education and related disciplines. These procedures can be useful with static data where an individual response might be nested in a family. Thus, a response might be explained by individual characteristics, such as personality traits, or by a family-level characteristic, such as family income.

Longitudinal applications differ from static applications in that there are repeated measurements of a variable for each individual. The repeated measurements are nested in the individual. Just as individuals in a family tend to be similar, repeated measurements for the same individual ...