Latent Class Analysis in the psychological research on attachment styles and the transition to parenthood

Latent Class Analysis (LCA) allows the identification of unmeasured class membership among subjects using either categorical or continuous observed variables, or both. It can be considered a mixture modelling since the probability distribution of the overall population is a mixture of the distributions of the subpopulations. Referring to LCA as a mixture model is useful to underline that it is a person-centred, or person-oriented, approach, i.e., it describes similarities and differences among individuals, rather than among variables. In this study we consider the application of LCA to data from a psychological research carried out in in Lombardy, a Northern Italian region. The research focused on the transition to parenthood, enshrining every sort of generative choice, not to have children too, in relation to the attachment styles in different phases of the life cycle. The R environment is used.