Abstract:

The accelerated longitudinal design (ALD) is a method used to conducts several short-term longitudinal studies of adjacent age cohorts simultaneously, producing temporally overlapping measurements of the adjacent age groups, and then linking the segments of limited longitudinal data from different age cohorts and creating a common long-term developmental trend or growth curve. The method manages to combine true longitudinal and cross-sectional design, which can maintain most of the advantages for true longitudinal design, reducing problems of retest effects and attrition, but may also be able to separate aging effects from period and cohort effects, and thus has been commonly applied in developmental psychology researches. Existing researches focus on data analysis methods, effectiveness and design features of ALD. Future research should study the flexibility when extending design features, and explore data analysis methods under nonlinear hypothesis or when cohort effects exist, and methods for missing data.

Key words: longitudinal study, accelerated longitudinal design, data analysis method, design feature