Daan Hulsmans

26 Chapter 1 in this target group, important questions are: how many of their diaries do they complete, and what do they think of doing so? Figure 4 A hypothetical example of Chapter 4's lens for studying change Note. A hypothetical example of what change processes of the individuals from Figure 3 may look like when data is collected with ecological momentary assessments between baseline and follow-up. In Chapter 4 we explore the feasibility of collecting daily self-ratings for people with a mild intellectual disability. If people with mild intellectual disability can adhere to such a protocol, it would allow researchers to collect timeseries of behavioral problems. Research in clinical settings that zoomed in on individuals' change processes using timeseries has shown that change very rarely resembles a straight line but is most often discontinuous and characterized by sudden changes (Hayes et al., 2007; Kazdin, 2019; Tang & DeRubeis, 1999; Topolinsky & Reber, 2010). Figure 4 illustrates what one is thus likely to find. The colored lines now differ from the colored ones in Figure 3 – they do not reflect averages of subgroups of people, but individual people's change trajectories. Imagine the purple line in Figure 3 is one of the women who followed the treatment. The average of women (Figure 3) would suggest no change occurred between two time points two months apart, but at the individual level, one can expect variability from day to day. Whereas average lines of Figure 2 and Figure 3 gave the impression that those people had barely changed, the timeseries of these same individuals in Figure 4 illustrate that things most definitely did change – and scarcely ever in ways that resemble the average group-level change. In the remaining two chapters we studied change at the individual level. That is, instead of analyzing a change process that is aggregated

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