Understanding Relative and Absolute Change in Discontinuous Growth Models
在基本非连续增长模型基础上，通过重新设定时间变量，帮助研究者检验转型期和转型后斜率中的相对变化与绝对变化，并举例说明多种情境下的应用。
Organizational researchers routinely have access to repeated measures from numerous time periods punctuated by one or more discontinuities. Discontinuities may be planned, such as when a researcher introduces an unexpected change in the context of a skill acquisition task. Alternatively, discontinuities may be unplanned, such as when a natural disaster or economic event occurs during an ongoing data collection. In this article, we build off the basic discontinuous growth model and illustrate how alternative specifications of time-related variables allow one to examine relative versus absolute change in transition and post-transition slopes. Our examples focus on interpreting time-varying covariates in a variety of situations (multiple discontinuities, linear and quadratic models, and models where discontinuities occur at different times). We show that the ability to test relative and absolute differences provides a high degree of precision in terms of specifying and testing hypotheses.