Psychological Health From the Teens to the 80s: Multiple Developmental Trajectories

Data from the long-term Intergenerational Studies are used to explore men’s and women’s psychological health trajectories from early adolescence to late adulthood, as elucidated by Nagin’s (Group-based modeling of development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005) finite mixture modeling method. Two separate measures of psychological health, one from the California Q-sort (CQS; Block in The Q-sort method in personality assessment and psychiatric research. Thomas, Springfield, IL, 1961) and one from the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough and Bradley in CPI manual, 3rd edn. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1996) are used, with a maximum of six pooled points of data collection. Distinct subtypes of developmental trajectory are uncovered, including patterns of nearly life-long trajectories of stability, as well as trajectories of increasing psychological health. For both measures of psychological health, the most common path (53% for CQS data, and 46% for CPI data) is that of relatively high initial psychological health with a subsequent modest linear increase. Results from the two measures neither perfectly replicate nor completely contradict one another. Both indicate the existence of discrete subgroups of change, including stability of psychological health for some and significant increase for others.