Longitudinal data are becoming increasingly common across the social sciences, offering powerful ways to study change over time in individuals, groups, and institutions.
At the same time, working with longitudinal data is genuinely complex: it introduces new concepts, new data structures, and new statistical models that go far beyond cross-sectional analysis. Researchers are expected to understand ideas such as dependence over time, within- and between-person change, unbalanced panels, and a growing set of specialised methods, often with little guidance on how these pieces fit together. For many people, learning longitudinal analysis feels overwhelming.
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Longitudinal Data Analysis in R is designed to help you make sense of this complexity. It brings together the key concepts, commands, and models you need to know in order to confidently work with longitudinal data. Rather than teaching everything in depth, the cheat sheet gives you a clear map showing how ideas connect, how methods differ, and where each approach fits—so you can build knowledge systematically instead of piecing it together from scattered sources.
What’s included:
- The workflow of longitudinal data analysis
- Core longitudinal concepts
- Main types of longitudinal data
- Key R commands for preparing longitudinal data
- Commands to describe and visualize longitudinal data
- An overview of the main longitudinal models used in practice
- Guidance on when to use different modelling approaches
- Interpretation of main models for longitudinal data
