When people conclude results from group-level data will tell you about individual-level processes, they commit the ecological fallacy. This is true even of the individuals whose data contributed to those group-level results. This phenomenon can seem odd and counterintuitive. Keep reading to improve your intuition.
If you are under the impression group-level data and group-based data analysis will inform you about within-person processes, you would be wrong. Stick around to learn why.
Abstract Behavioral researchers are concluding that conventional group-based analyses often mask meaningful individual differences and do not necessarily map onto the change processes within the lives of individual humans. Hayes et al. (2018) have called for a renewed focus on idiographic research, but with methods capable of nuanced multivariate insights and capable of scaling to nomothetic generalizations. To that end, we present a statistical technique we believe may be useful for the task: the dynamic p-technique.