Developmental Processes and the Modern Typological Perspective

Abstract

Within the general theoretical framework of the holistic-interactionistic paradigm, the need for using methods reflecting the process characteristics of a developmental study is emphasized and certain limitations of current research practice in this regard are pointed out. We focus on a person-oriented approach that can be regarded as a modern typological approach, where patterns of values in relevant variables describing the individual are regarded as indivisible, so that the variable has a meaning only as a part of such a pattern. It is claimed that such an approach can be more process-oriented and more compatible with the holistic-interactionistic paradigm than conventional methods. Some relevant classification-based methods are briefly reviewed, and a new method (TYFO) is presented that aims at finding typical developmental patterns in data without striving for a complete classification. The procedure is illustrated with an empirical example.