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Studying Developmental Processes in Accelerated Cohort-Sequential Designs with Discrete- and Continuous-Time Latent Change Score Models

[Published in Psychological Methods]. Studying the time-related course of psychological processes is a challenging endeavor, particularly over long developmental periods. Accelerated longitudinal designs (ALD) allow capturing such periods with a limited number of assessments in a much shorter time framework. In ALDs, participants from different cohorts are measured repeatedly but the measures provided by each participant cover only a fraction of the time range of the study. It is then assumed that the common trajectory can be studied by aggregating the information provided by the different converging cohorts. We conducted a Monte Carlo study to evaluate the practical relevance of using discrete- and continuous-time latent change score models for recovering the trajectories of a developmental process from ALD data under different sampling conditions. We focused on exponential trajectories typically found in the development of cognitive abilities from childhood to early adulthood. The results support the appropriateness of ALD designs to study such processes under various conditions of sampling. When all cohorts are drawn from the same population, both discrete- and continuous-time models are able to recover the parameters defining the underlying developmental process. However, discrete-time models yield biased estimates when time lags between observations are not constant. When cohorts are not from the same population and, thus, lack convergence, both types of models show bias in various parameters. We discuss the findings in the context of developmental methodology, encourage researchers to adopt continuous time models to analyze data from ALDs, and provide recommendations about how to implement such research designs.