Studying lives through time: Secondary data analyses in developmental psychology.

To study lives in context through time, many approaches are available to the developmental psychologist. Two such ways are the analyses of longitudinal national data and secondary data analysis of long-term developmental studies conducted to answer questions not originally posed. This article, the first in a series of four, considers the current opportunuities for, and possible limitations of, these two types of analyses, the policy relevance of these analyses, and their application in interdisciplinary research