Person-Centered Methodologies in the Organizational Sciences

Abstract

The 2011 Organizational Research Methods Feature Topic on latent class procedures has helped to establish person-centered analyses as a method of choice in the organizational sciences. This establishment has contributed to the generation of substantive-methodological synergies leading to a better understanding of a variety of organizational phenomena and to an improvement in research methodologies. The present Feature Topic aims to provide a user-friendly introduction to these new methodological developments for applied organizational researchers. Organized around a presentation of the typological, prototypical, and methodologically exploratory nature of personcentered analyses, this introductory article introduces seven contributions aiming to: (a) clarify the meaning, advantages, and applications of person-centered analyses; (b) illustrate emerging prototypical and longitudinal cluster analytic approaches; (c) introduce researchers to multilevel personcentered analyses as well as to auxiliary approaches that will drastically increase the scope of application of these methods; and (d) describe the application of these methods for confirmatory purposes.

Unpacking the intertemporal impact of self-regulation in a blended mathematics environment

“…Theories that are formulated as the existence of certain relationships between variables. Beyond the testing of these hypothesised relationships, also the case of predicting outcomes or studying how antecedents influence their consequences, require variable-centred modelling approaches and statistical dependence techniques that correspond to these approaches (Howard & Hoffman, 2018;Laursen & Hoff, 2006;Malcom-Piqueux, 2015;Marsh , Lüdtke , Trautwein, & Morin, 2009;Masyn, 2013;Morin, Bujacz, & Gagné, 2018).…”

“…In contrast, person-centred modelling approaches (Howard & Hoffman, 2018;Malcom-Piqueux, 2015;Masyn, 2013;Morin et al, 2018) have the goal to group individuals, such that people within each category are similar to each other and different from individuals in other categories. A major reason to apply person-centred modelling lies in characteristics of the data, in particular when using large data sets from contexts with "diverse" heterogenous students.…”

Not All Are Equal: A Latent Profile Analysis of Well-Being Among the Self-Employed

“…This study identifies profiles of the self-employed taking into account different wellbeing indicators. Such approach relaxes the assumption that all individuals in the sample belong to the same population (Morin et al 2018;Wang and Hanges 2011), and thus it is especially appropriate for a study that aims at exploring how individuals differ from one another. By estimating profiles, we investigate a more comprehensive well-being concept than it was previously studied among the self-employed.…”

The time has come to study dynamics at work

“…Finally, analyzing dynamic phenomena can be challenging. One of the reasons for the increasing popularity of this line of research is the rapid improvements in analytical techniques and in computational power (Morin, Bujacz, & Gagné, ; Wang et al, ). The downside of this is that the sheer amount of available analytical techniques can be overwhelming.…”