Methods for studying life course health inequalities

The latter two decades of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century witnessed the emergence of life course theory in social science, as well as a significant increase in the availability of longitudinal data and the development of both the computing power and statistical methods to analyze. There are two general classes of methods used in examining health inequalities across the life course: (1) methods for modeling events and transitions, and (2) methods for modeling patterns of repeated measures. The former class of methods includes hazard and survival models, as well as life table methods arising from demography. The latter class of methods includes both growth models and various flavors of latent class methods. In this chapter, we present an overview of some of the most common models in these classes of methods and discuss their advantages, disadvantages, and limitations.