Using Dynamic Panel Models to Study Age–Related Differences and Time–Related Changes in Personality

Abstract

Along with an increasing interest in the plasticity and role of personality across the adult lifespan comes the need for a diverse set of innovative statistical approaches to study it. With this paper, we set out to illustrate some of the possibilities and challenges in modelling age-related differences and time-related changes in personality psychology by means of dynamic panel models. To this end, we first distinguish between the study of age-related differences and timerelated changes and demonstrate how the treatment of age and time as either discrete or continuous variables implies important modelling choices. Second, we present a selection of four example cases that address the topic of age moderation in diverse matters and with different objectives. Based on our cross-tabulation of age and time as discrete and continuous variables, the first two example cases represent fairly well-established models (cases A and B), whereas the remaining cases are used to illustrate current developments in the field (cases C and D). We close the paper with some final remarks on current limitation and future research directions.

Does Age Matter for Personality Psychology?

“…work performance, health, and relationship satisfaction) should be taken into account. Wagner and colleagues () describe innovative statistical models to test such dynamic reciprocal influences to move beyond relatively static age moderations of personality traits predicting outcomes. Third, the current articles included no children before elementary school (e.g.…”

Stability and change of perceived characteristics of major life events.

“…To keep the figure parsimonious, we did not include illustrations of means. In the models addressing Research Question 3, random intercepts were included to distinguish between-person and within-person variability 5 (Voelkle et al, 2018;Wagner et al, 2019). In the models addressing Research Questions 1 and 2, in contrast, the intercept was fixed for two reasons.…”

Stability and Change of Perceived Characteristics of Major Life Events

“…Since CTMs are not yet widely used in psychology (Deboeck, 2013;Voelkle et al, 2012;Wagner et al, 2019), we explain them in detail in the section 'Data Analysis' below. To facilitate the interpretation of the findings of stability and change of perceived event characteristics, we also computed CTMs for measures of personality and affective well-being as their stability has been well examined (Lüdtke et al, 2011;Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000;Vaidya et al, 2008;Watson & Walker, 1996).…”

“…Within-person variance quantifies changes of a construct within individuals over time. Rank-order stability (based on test-retest correlations) has been criticized since it mixes these two types of variance (Cicchetti, 1994;Wagner et al, 2019). This criticism applies also to our estimation of rank-order stability.…”

“…Models to answer Research Questions 1 and 2 did not include random intercepts, since models without random intercepts are more parsimonious and may lead to more consistent results (de Moor et al, 2021). However, in the models addressing Research Question 3, random intercepts were included to distinguish between-person and within-person variability (Voelkle et al, 2018;Wagner et al, 2019).…”