Person-centered analysis: Methods, applications, and implications for occupational health psychology.
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In this chapter, we discuss the methods, applications, and implications of person-centered analysis for occupational health psychology (OHP) research. Four specific research methods are introduced (i.e., latent profile analysis, latent class analysis, growth mixture modeling, and mixture latent Markov modeling). We end this chapter by discussing several important issues in using these methods in empirical research. People often tend to explain others' behavior by sorting them into groups, sets of people who share some common characteristics. In organizational theory, such groups are often referred to as profiles or configurations that "denote any multidimensional constellation of conceptually distinct categories that commonly occur together". As Meyer et al. note, while in theory any particular set of attributes could combine together in an infinite number of combinations, in practice, sets of attributes tend to fall into small numbers of patterns. Thus, "just a fraction of the theoretically conceivable configurations are viable and apt to be observed empirically". Mintzberg's theory of organizational forms provides an example of configural thinking. He argued that organizations tend to take on one of a small number of structural configurations that encompass a wide range of variables, such as the relative size of production and support staff, the degree to which work processes are highly standardized, and the nature of authority relationships. For instance, large organizations with very few layers of management are rare or nonexistent; small organizations are never highly bureaucratic. Although Mintzberg's model deals with configurations of "objective" characteristics of organizations it is possible to apply the same kind of reasoning to individual characteristics to study configurations or patterns of psychological characteristics that a group of people share in common. Such person-centered research involves empirical efforts to identify a set of groups that best represent the patterns of covariation among the variables of interest and then investigate differences between these groups on other measures, such as safety performance behaviors or health outcomes. Studies using person-centered methods are rare in occupational health psychology (OHP), but offer a great deal of potential for generating increased understanding of existing bodies of literature as well as generating new theoretical perspectives. With this enormous potential benefit in mind, the goal of this chapter is twofold. First, we conduct a detailed review of contemporary statistical methods for conducting configural research. Then, we use the literature on organizational commitment profiles to illustrate several of the decisions and issues that arise in configural research. We use the terms configural, profile-based, and person-centered interchangeably, to refer to research that has the general goal of identifying differences between people in their patterns of scores on a set of variables, with each pattern typically referred to as a profile or a configuration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
