The German and Australian longitudinal surveys analysed here are the first national representative surveys to show that (1) people who continuously own a pet are the healthiest group and (2) people who cease to have a pet or never had one are less healthy. Most previous studies which have...

This work provides the reader with the fundamentals of data collection, model construction, analyses, and interpretation across a wide repertoire of demographic techniques and protocols, clearly guided throughout with fully reproducible R scripts.