21 General Introduction 1 between five distinct but related dimensions (Embregts et al., 2019). Problem behavior may be sustained or even exacerbated when staff demand too much, too little, or the wrong things of the individual. In such cases, there exists a disbalance between the (dis)abilities of a person (left panel in Figure 1) and the provided support (oval in the middle). The AAIDD model presented in Figure 1 shows an immense amount of psychological, biological, and social factors contributing to problematic behaviors. The model is broad and comprehensive, which illustrates the complex task of understanding these behaviors. What complicates the matter even further is that – in addition to their multifaceted nature – behaviors change over time in person-specific ways. Studying change We have now arrived at the central topic of this dissertation: studying change. Stimulating youngsters to change their problematic behaviors for the better, or at least preventing change for the worse, is the essence of (youth) care practice. It constitutes the main goal of thousands of care professionals. They develop and implement prevention and intervention programs. They build relationships with their clients. They listen, educate, empower, and guide them – all with the aim of achieving improvements over time. All chapters in this dissertation are dedicated to answering the question of how and why problematic behaviors of people with a mild intellectual disability change over time. Below, I illustrate one fundamental contrast in approaches to studying change. Nomothetic and idiographic There are essentially two routes for studying change in people: the nomothetic approach and the idiographic approach. Nomothetic research looks broadly at whether a group of individuals change over time. The aim here is to identify lawlike change patterns within a sample, that then apply (or generalize) to a population. Idiographic research, on the other hand, is not about understanding how samples or populations change but attempts to understand the individual's change trajectory. The emphasis of an idiographic approach is on the uniqueness of individuals, rather than their sameness. That is, mapping out their own personspecific historical, psychological, and social context in relation to change. This dissertation will describe studies on change processes that use the nomothetic and
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