Trajectories of loneliness across adolescence: An empirical comparison of longitudinal clustering methods using R.

All three methods corroborate the literature in this field by finding that the largest portion of subjects experience stable and low levels of loneliness. However, the clustering methods also reveal that there is a portion of subjects that experience changes in loneliness during adolescence. By comparing the results of nonparametric clustering methods to the latent class mixture model, this study equips researchers with an example of how to implement these models and thereby contributes to the literature on longitudinal clustering in the social sciences. Altogether the analyses show that it might be useful to investigate different algorithms to identify the most robust solution.