How can process-based researchers bridge the gap between individuals and groups? Discover the dynamic p-technique

Publication date: Available online 9 July 2019Source: Journal of Contextual Behavioral ScienceAuthor(s): A. Solomon Kurz, Yelena L. Johnson, Karen Kate Kellum, Kelly G. WilsonAbstractBehavioral researchers are concluding that conventional group-based analyses often mask meaningful individual differences and do not necessarily map onto the change processes in individual human lives. Hayes et al. (2018) have called for a renewed focus on idiographic research, but with methods capable of nuances multivariate insights and capable of scaling to nomothetic generalizations. To that end, we present a statistical technique we believe may be useful for the task: the dynamic p-technique. The dynamic p-technique can accommodate multivariate longitudinal data and may be used to conduct single-subject and group-level analyses. After introducing the dynamic p-technique, we provide several examples of how it may be used in practice by presenting the step-by-step analyses of single-subject daily-diary dataset wherein we examined the day-to-day associations between ADHD difficulties and psychotropic medication. Although it has been underutilized by behavioral researchers, we believe p-technique analyses are particularly well-suited to model personal dynamics with nuance and within context and allow researchers to inductively build from idiographic patterns to nomothetic trends. For a fine-grain walk-through of the analyses presented, including the data and statistical code, link to our supplem...
Source: Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research