Behavioral Landscapes and Change in Behavioral Landscapes: A Multiple Time-Scale Density Distribution Approach

Abstract

Multiple observations are needed to obtain a robust characterization of individuals’ behavioral tendencies across time and context. In this article, the authors fuse core ideas from the study of lifespan development with intraindividual variability based approaches to personality and with methods used to characterize the topography of geographic landscapes. The authors generalize the notion of density distributions into bivariate and multivariate space and draw parallels between the resulting behavioral landscapes and geographic landscapes. The authors illustrate through an empirical example how multiple time-scale study designs, measures of intraindividual variability, and methods borrowed from geography can be used to describe both an individual's behavioral landscape and changes in the behavioral landscape.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging (RC1 AG035645) and the Penn State Social Science Research Institute. The authors would like to offer many thanks to the study participants for providing a detailed glimpse of their daily lives for such extended periods of time, and to the many research assistants who helped obtain such rich data.