Distinguishing sympathisers, philanthropists, rusted on activists and radicals: Using person-centred analyses in collective action research

Many of our theories and models within social psychology implicitly refer to ‘types’ or subgroups of people who engage in collective action (activists, protestors), or do not (sympathisers, bystanders). Other frameworks differentiate between actors based on their adoption of tactics (benevolents, activists, radicals). How, empirically, do we distinguish sympathisers from activists? Activists from radicals? This paper describes recent research that adopts person-centred statistical approaches (e.g., latent profile analysis, latent transition analysis, latent growth mixture models) to address three contemporary puzzles of collective action research. We present research showing that the methods are useful in identifying and explaining sub-groups of people who seek to bring about change in qualitatively different ways. The methods are also useful for understanding volatility in collective action as well as identifying and understanding variation in how people sustain, increase, or diminish their commitment over time. There is nothing so practical as a good method and person-centred statistical approaches are an important complement to variable-centred approaches in social psychological research on collective action.