A research strategy organised around specific kinds of persons and addressing issues such as what kinds of problems handicapped children meet in comparison to non-handicapped ones. There are two distinct interpretations of what constitutes such an approach. One is associated with the system of counselling and psychotherapy devised by Carl Rogers (1902-1987) and referred to as the Rogerian approach In a nutshell, it focuses on a client’s self-understandng and a means beneficially altering the self-concept. In this respect, it differs from psychodynamic and behavioral approaches such as cognitive behavioral theory. The other interpretation concerns at what level, individual or some collective variable, longitudinal research evaluates change over time. Thus, in a person-centered approach the person is the unit of analysis in contrast to a variable-centered one. In studying development, an optimal approach would be to integrate both approaches in the same longitudinal study (e.g., by means of latent profile analysis). .
See Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), Latent variable modelling, Longitudinal studies, Person-specific variance, Variable-centered approaches