Response: Statistical Models of Educational Stratification—Hauser and Andrew's Models for School Transitions

Many proposed methods for analyzing clustered ordinal data focus on the regression model and consider the association structure within a cluster as a nuisance. However, often the association structure is of equal interest, for example, temporal association in longitudinal studies and association between responses to similar questions in a survey. We discuss the use, appropriateness and interpretability of various latent variable and Markov models for the association structure and propose a new structure that exploits the ordinality of the response. The models are illustrated with a study concerning opinions regarding government spending and an analysis of stability and change in teenage marijuana use over time, where we reveal different behavioral patterns for boys and girls through a comprehensive investigation of individual response profiles.