Is It Necessary to Classify Developmental Trajectories over Time? A Critical Note

This paper is a critical note regarding the classification of developmental trajectories. Although the results should be interpreted with caution, it seems that this classification can be interesting for descriptive purposes. For answering additional research questions relating to the prediction and/or the consequences of a different development over time, the classification of developmental trajectories does not seem to be necessary. However, it should be realized that the present analysis employs a relatively simple classification method and that there are some new promising developments within the field of classification methods, which can be of interest.