Recent Developments in Child Personality Research

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Recent Developments in Child Personality Research

• Maja Zupancic
• University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

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Overview

• The trait approach, focus on the FFM
• Search for precursors of the Big Five in
  childhood
• A newly developed measure, the ICID
• Structure of pre-adult personality
• Cross-cultural, gender and age differences in
  trait expression
• Aspects of child trait consistency
• Personality traits in predicting important
  outcomes
• Child personality types
• Other recent measures
• Future prospects

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The Trait Approach

• Traits Enduring tendencies to feel, think, and
  act in a relatively consistent way over time
  across contexts (Burger, 2008 Funder, 2001
  McCrae Costa, 2004)
• A relative agreement on the Five-Factor Model
  (FFM) to summarize the organization of adult
  personality traits across countries (e.g., MCrae
  Costa, 1997)
• Covers the OCEAN of human personality
• Criticism limitations (Block, 1995 Eysenck,
  1997 Paunonen Jackson, 2000 Saucier
  Goldberg, 1998), e.g. developmentally shallow
  (Graziano, 1994)

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What about Children?

• Empirical FFM studies Adults, except Digman
  (1963, 1989, 1990 Digman Inouye, 1986)
• Developmental ? (Shiner, 2006) Personality
• Conceptualized with an eye towards adult
  structure
• Understood in light of its antecedents
• Do adults perceive children beyond temperament?
  How do adults organize child characteristics?
• Usefulness of the FFM in older children/early
  adolescents, 2 major approaches
• Adult FFM measure, adjustment of phrasing, rating
  
• FFM scores from measures constructed within an
  other model

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Questions on Ecological Validity

• Items may not represent a full range of
  individual differences
• Based on measures to assess adults
• Capture theorists-imposed core constructs
• May not reflect characteristics salient for
  caregivers/teachers in daily life
• Difficult to deduce from scores
• Personality structure reflects child features or
  results from a specific instrument
• Forced squeezing may obscure age-specific
  features

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The 3rd Approach Free Descriptive

• Create a lexicon of child personality descriptive
  words (John, 1990)
• No catalogue on child individual differences
• Dictionaries reflect passive vocabulary
• Lexical hypothesis Parental natural language
  will encode child individual differences that are
  significant in daily interaction. The more
  important the feature, the more will be talked
  about.

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How do Caregivers Describe Children?

• The 3rd approach used within a multi-national
  project (Kohnstamm et al., 1998)
• Interview caregivers of children ages 3-12
• B, CHN, D, GR, NL, PL, USA Increase ecological
  representativeness of the descriptions
• Parse code personality descriptors

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Coding Manual The Big 5(Havill et al., 1994)
Little 8
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of Overall Descriptors in 5 Main Categories 7
countries

• Across all samples over 86 of descriptors coded
  into Big 5 Personality Categories (Kohnstamm et
  al., 1998)

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of Overall Descriptors in 5 Main Categories SLO

• Replicated in Slovenia multiple-informants,
  extended to infants/toddlers (Zupancic, 2001,
  2004 Zupancic Kavcic, 2002)

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Parental Natural Language Differences
Similarities

• - Remarkable similarities in frequency of the
  descriptors across (sub)categories
• - Small age, gender, culture differences
• - FFM-inspired system A good heuristic
• - No conclusions on underlying strucure
• Kohnstamm et al., 1998 Zupancic, 2004

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Parental Language Questionnaire Development

• New instruments were created in each country for
  separately assessing children age 3, 6, 9 12
• Could a cross-age and cross-country questionnaire
  be produced?
• HiPIC in B (Mervielde DeFruyt, 2002)
• Georgia, US Prototypical items for all (CHN,
  GR, NL, US) age-specific samples, matching the
  distribution of the Big 5 - a preliminary ICID
  (Halverson Havill, 1997)
• Independent samples in CHN, GR, US, further
  procedures and refinements

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The Inventory of Child Individual Differences
(ICID)

• Final version 108 items, the same across age and
  country were retained
• Factor analyses in 3 countries across age
  revealed 15 mid-level personality scales
• Achievement Oriented (