title: Parental Descriptions of Child Personality : Developmental Antecedents of the Big Five? LEA Series in Personality and Clinical Psychology author: Kohnstamm, Geldolph A. publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. isbn10 | asin: 0805823018 print isbn13: 9780805823011 ebook isbn13: 9780585257785 language: English subject Personality in children, Temperament in children. publication date: 1998 lcc: BF723.P4P36 1998eb ddc: 155.4/182 subject: Personality in children, Temperament in children. cover Page i Parental Descriptions of Child Personality Developmental Antecedents of the Big Five? page_i Page ii The LEA Series in Personality and Clinical Psychology Irving B. Weiner, Editor Gacono/Meloy The Rorschach Assessment of Aggressive and Psychopathic Personalities Zillmer/Harrower/Ritzler/Archer The Quest for the Nazi Personality: A Psychological Investigation of Nazi War Criminals Sarason/Pierce/Sarason Cognitive Interference: Theories, Methods, and Findings Exner (Ed.) Issues and Methods in Rorschach Research Hy/Lovinger Measuring Ego Development, Second Edition Ganellen Integrating the Rorschach and the MMPI-2 in Personality Assessment Kelly The Assessment of Object Relations Phenomena in Adolescents: TAT and Rorschach Measures Meloy/Acklin/Gacono/Murray/Peterson (Eds.) Contemporary Rorschach Interpretation: A Casebook McCallum/Piper (Eds.) Psychological Mindedness: A Contemporary Understanding VanHasselt/Herson (Eds.) Handbook of Psychological Treatment Protocols for Children Handler/Hilsenroth Teaching and Learning Personality Assessment Loevinger (Ed.) Technical Foundations for Measuring Ego Development: The Washington University Sentence Completion Test Tedeschi/Park/Calhoun (Eds.) Posttraumatic Growth: Positive Changes in the Aftermath of Crisis Wong/Fry (Eds.) The Human Quest for Meaning: A Handbook of Psychological Research and Clinical Applications Kohnstamm/Halverson/Mervielde/Havill (Eds.) Parental Descriptions of Child Personality: Developmental Antecedents of the Big Five? page_ii Page iii Parental Descriptions of Child Personality Developmental Antecedents of the Big Five? Edited by Geldolph A. Kohnstamm Leiden University Charles F. Halverson, Jr. University of Georgia Ivan Mervielde University of Ghent Valerie L. Havill University of Georgia page_iii Page iv Copyright © 1998 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microfilm, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, NJ 07430 Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parental descriptions of child personality : developmental antecedents of the big five? / edited by Geldolph A. Kohnstamm . . . [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-8058-2301-8 1. Personality in children. 2. Temperament in chil- dren. I. Kohnstamm, Geldolph A. BF723.P4P36 1998 155.4'182 dc21 97-32503 CIP Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 page_iv Page v Contents Preface vii 1 Analyzing Parental Free Descriptions of Child Personality Geldolph A. Kohnstamm, Charles F. Halverson, Jr., Ivan Mervielde, and Valerie L. Havill 1 2 Extraversion: Toward a Unifying Description From Infancy to Adulthood Eric Elphick, Charles F. Halverson, Jr., and Magdalena Marzal-Wisniewska 21 3 Agreeableness as a Diachronic Human Trait Valerie L. Havill, Elias Besevegis, and Sophia Mouroussaki 49 4 A Developmental Integration of Conscientiousness From Childhood to Adulthood Geldolph A. Kohnstamm, Yuching Zhang, Anne-Marie Slotboom, and Eric Elphick 65 5 Emotional Stability: Developmental Perspectives From Childhood to Adulthood Alois Angleitner, Geldolph A. Kohnstamm, Anne-Marie Slotboom, and Elias Besevegis 85 6 Linking Openness and Intellect in Childhood and Adulthood Ivan Mervielde, Filip De Fruyt, and Slawomir Jarmuz 105 page_v Page vi 7 Developmental Changes in Personality Descriptions of Children: A Cross-National Comparison of Parental Descriptions of Children Anne-Marie Slotboom, Valerie L. Havill, Vassilis Pavlopoulos, and Filip De Fruyt 127 8 Parental Personality Descriptions of Boys and Girls Filip De Fruyt, Alain Van Hiel, and Veerle Buyst 155 9 How African American Parents Describe Their Children James B. Victor, Harold E. Dent, Barbara Carter, Charles F. Halverson, Jr., and Valerie L. Havill 169 10 Validity of Results Obtained by Analyzing Free Personality Descriptions Ivan Mervielde 189 Appendix: Composition of the Seven Samples Anne-Marie Slotboom and Eric Elphick 205 Author Index 211 Subject Index 217 page_vi Page vii Preface The research reported in this book should be thought of as part of the continuing search for the main dimensions of temperament and personality in childhood. Several competing theoretical traditions exist, and each has generated a variety of instruments to measure dimensions of specific interest to the particular theory. Although the variety of theories and instruments is not as overwhelming as in adult personality psychology, progress in developmental psychology has been hampered by the fact that individual differences in temperament and personality are conceptualized and assessed in so many different ways. More often than not, the outcomes of research in which temperament measures play a major role cannot be compared because measures used to operationalize individual differences are themselves incomparable. Progress in this field would be facilitated if consensus were reached on what the most important and "basic" dimensions of temperament are in infancy, in childhood, and in adolescence. One possible way to achieve such a goal is to bring theorists together at conferences and to attempt to reach consensus by discussing the merits of each individual theory. Although such conferences (e.g., the 12 successive Occasional Temperament Conferences held in the United States) have been very stimulating and rewarding, the goal of achieving consensus remains remote. While struggling to obtain uniformity in theory and assessment of temperament in childhood, however, we came across research documenting the emerging consensus in adult personality psychology that the domain of adult personality could be comprehensively represented by five factors.1 The Five-Factor Model (FFM) consensus among researchers of adult personality is stimulated by theory based on the study of language more precisely on the study of adjectives that are used for denoting individual 1 Historically, the terms Big Five and Five-Factor Model stem from different research traditions, the former being associated with the lexical approach (see Goldberg, 1993, for a short overview) and the latter with the NEO-PI personality inventory by McCrae and Costa. In this book, both terms are used interchangeably. page_vii Page viii differences in personality. These adjectives have been selected from dictionaries, but also, in recent years, from free descriptions of personality given by adults. The five main dimensions are usually labeled as (I) Extraversion, (II) Agreeableness, (III) Conscientiousness, (IV) Emotional Stability or Instability, and (V) Intellect, Culture, or Openness to Experience. Until recently, only the studies by Digman and his associates (Digman, 1963, 1990; Digman & Inouye, 1986) explored the validity of the FFM for assessing individual differences in personality among children. Now, the number of studies exploring child personality is rapidly growing (e.g., Digman & Shmelyov, 1996; Halverson, Kohnstamm, & Martin, 1994). When we began to explore the possibility of adapting this approach to the field of temperament and personality in childhood, we were hampered by the fact that there was no compilation of terms to describe temperament and personality in children. A dictionary-based approach, as was used in adult personality psychology, seemed cumbersome and inadequate for studying individual differences in childhood because many of the words were clearly developmentally inappropriate. One of us had already experimented for some years with free parental descriptions of temperament characteristics of children. These characteristics had been categorized in a temporary category system that was in continuous development. Encouraged by the fact that John (1990a, 1990b) and Church and Katigbak (1989) had used a similar approach with free descriptions to validate some aspects of the FFM (in particular, the model's claim of comprehensiveness, i.e., that it covered the major dimensions of personality), we decided to collect parental free or natural-language descriptions of children in several languages and cultures. The first goal of this project was to create an alternative dictionary (in each language) of expressions used by parents to describe the characteristics of their children. These lexicons are now being used in the second phase of the project to provide representative words and phrases to construct items for a series of age-related questionnaires in the various countries. Factor analyzing data from parental ratings of these questionnaires should then result in age-appropriate n-factor models summarizing the common variance in these questionnaires. The resemblance between these n-factor models for individual differences in children of different ages and the FFM in adulthood can then be studied. These are the goals we are pursuing. Why have we emphasized different languages and cultures? We believe that the descriptions parents spontaneously use to characterize their children depend partly on the saliency of certain traits in their children and partly on what parents expect to see, based on family history, as well as on the prevailing belief systems about what traits are important for children in their particular cultures (Harkness & Super, 1996; Sigel, 1985). Parents in different cultures might use different personality traits to describe their children, but the evidence as to whether they do so remains sketchy. Dictionary-based studies page_viii Page ix in psychological research of adult personality have now been done or are underway in many different countries and languages. Data from these studies seem to be pointing toward the cultural universality of the Big Five for adult individual differences psychology. Our work, however, is directed at the question of cultural universality of major dimensions of temperament and personality in childhood. From our developmental interest follows the next question: How do the major dimensions of infancy and childhood gradually evolve into adult personality structure? The intent of this volume is to lay a foundation to answer these questions. We present and discuss the results of the first phase of an ambitious project: the analysis of the contents of the free descriptions collected in seven different countries. In the first chapter we describe the research method and samples that provided the data. Chapters 2 through 6 then present results for the five major categories of the coding scheme. In chapter 7, cross-sectional age comparisons of samples from seven countries are analyzed. This chapter is followed by one discussing child gender effects. In chapter 9, results are summarized from a sample of African American parents living in Virginia. The last chapter deals with the validity of the data collected in this international project. Throughout the book, the samples are named by country names (for example: "the Dutch sample"). This practice does not imply that the authors pretend that the samples are representative for the country populations. In the Appendix the demographic details of all samples are presented. Acknowledgments Support for the Belgian part of the project came from Grant No. OZF-0112792 from the University of Ghent and from a NATO Collaborative Research Grant (941239) awarded to I. Mervielde. Support for the Chinese part of the project came from the Child Development Center of China, Beijing, the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences and Leiden University. Support for the Dutch part came from Leiden University. The German part was partially financed through funds from a Max Planck Research Prize given to A. Angleitner and J. Strelau (No. 27 360). The Greek part was funded by the Research Committee of the University of Athens. The Polish part was supported by the Committee for Scientific Research (Komitet Badan Naukowych), the University of Wroclaw, and the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Finally, support for the U.S. part of the project came from National Institute of Mental Health Grant No. MH 50302 to C.F. Halverson, Jr., and National Institute of Mental Health Grant No. MH53272 to J. Victor. page_ix Page x References Church, A.T., & Katigbak, M.S. (1989). Internal, external and self-reward structure of personality in non-Western culture: An investigation of cross-language and cross-cultural generalizability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 857-872. Digman, J.M. (1963). Principal dimensions of child personality as inferred from teachers' judgments. Child Development, 34, 43-60. Digman, J.M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. In M.R. Rosenzweig & L.W. Porter (Eds.), Annual Review of Psychology (Vol. 41, pp. 417-440). Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. Digman, J.M., & Inouye, J. (1986). Further specification of the five robust factors of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 116-123. Digman, J.M., & Shmelyov, A.G. (1996). The structure of temperament and personality in Russian children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7, 341-351. Goldberg, L.R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 1, 26-34. Halverson, C.F., Jr., Kohnstamm, G.A., & Martin, R.P. (Eds.). (1994). Development of the structure of temperament and personality from infancy to adulthood. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Harkness, S., & Super, C.M. (Eds.). (1996). Parents' cultural belief systems: Their origins, expressions, and consequences. New York: The Guilford Press. John, O.P. (1990a). The ''Big Five'' factor taxonomy: Dimensions of Personality in the natural language and in questionnaires. In L.A. Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 66-100). New York: The Guilford Press. John, O.P. (1990b). Towards a Taxonomy of Personality Descriptors. In D.M. Buss & N. Cantor (Eds.), Personality psychology: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 261-271). New York: Springer Verlag. Sigel, I.E. (Ed.). (1985). Parental belief systems: The psychological consequences for children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. page_x Page 1 1 Analyzing Parental Free Descriptions of Child Personality Geldolph A. Kohnstamm Leiden University Charles F. Halverson, Jr. University of Georgia Ivan Mervielde University of Ghent Valerie L. Havill University of Georgia Since Thomas and Chess popularized the concept of temperament in childhood (e.g., 1977), many studies devoted to temperamental differences among children have been published, and the nine-dimensional structure devised by Thomas, Chess, and their collaborators has attained textbook status. Applied initially to the study of infants, but later to older children as well, this approach categorizes temperamental differences based on clinical experience into nine more or less independent traits: Activity Level, Rhythmicity, Approach-Withdrawal, Adaptability, Threshold of Responsiveness, Intensity of Reaction, Quality of Mood, Distractibility, and Persistence. Beyond these first-order constructs, second-order constructs of three clusters easy, difficult, and slow to warm up have been proposed based on factor analyses of the nine scales. Because of their clinical usefulness, the temperament scales developed by Thomas and Chess and later by Carey and others (e.g., Carey & McDevitt, 1978) became well-known instruments for assessing temperamental differences in infancy and childhood. We have begun with this brief history to emphasize that temperament measures currently in use, regardless of format, are top-down, theoretically derived instruments, with items reflecting the concerns of the child-care specialists. Even when page_1 Page 2 some form of factor analysis has been used to summarize dimensions statistically as opposed to clinically the final result has still depended on item selection done in constructing the instruments. In the case of the scales by Thomas and Chess and by Carey (e.g., McDevitt & Carey, 1978), other authors have shown that the original nine dimensions have not been recovered from factoring at the item level. Instead, from five to seven factors not closely resembling the original nine have emerged (see Martin, Wisenbaker, & Huttunen, 1994). We have emphasized here how the theoretical and clinical concerns of the Thomas and Chess group have shaped the temperament field. We have no quarrel with the usefulness of the nine- dimensional structure for many clinical assessments or research programs, but the dimensions might not be comprehensive, coherent statistically, or robust across ages and cultures. There are other ways to develop items, as we next propose, and there is a pressing need to assess the cross-cultural generality of constructs developed largely in one language or culture. Anthropologists and cross-cultural researchers have begun to demand justification for such cross-cultural applications of psychological instruments (e.g., Malpass & Poortinga, 1986; Shwalb, Shwalb, & Shoji, 1994). Although it might seem that cultural homogeneity is on the increase at the same time that cultural uniqueness is on the decrease, a world where cultural differences have vanished in one big melting pot has not yet arrived. Thus, the appropriateness of translation and application of psychological instruments across cultures should be questioned more frequently than is presently done. Thus far, cross-cultural studies in the field of temperament have consisted mostly of comparisons of means and variances on scales originating in England (e.g., Eysenck Personality Questionnaire [EPQ], Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) or the United States and translated into other languages. Although this work has produced many interesting results, we decided to follow a different approach. Free Descriptions of Personality We were originally motivated by John (1990a), who called for more studies using free descriptions of personality to test for the possibility that the reliance on top-down, theorist-imposed descriptors was "too parochial": . . . given that the Big Five were intended to represent the major dimensions of natural-language personality descriptions, another option is to investigate the characteristics people use in free descriptions of themselves and others. Would the Big Five be replicated if the set of descriptors factored was based page_2 Page 3 on the content of subjects' free descriptions, rather than on those sets of terms selected by the taxonomers themselves? (p. 92) To explore this question, John and Chaplin (John, 1990a, 1990b) asked more than 300 U.S. college students to describe their own personalities and to generate terms for both their desirable and their undesirable characteristics. This first phase of collecting, categorizing, and counting descriptors was then followed by a second phase in which the 60 most frequently used descriptors were put in a questionnaire and given to a new sample of subjects. Factor analyses of self-ratings yielded five factors that closely resembled the conceptual definitions of the Five-Factor Model (FFM), a finding supporting the hypothesis that these five factors are indeed the most salient dimensions of personality for U.S. college students. The FFM free-description methodology has been used cross-culturally as well. For example, Church, Katigbak, and Castaneda (1988) conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews with 41 Filipino bilingual (English and Tagalog) college students. The students provided general descriptions of healthy and unhealthy Filipinos in several broad areas of functioning (e.g., attitudes and feelings toward others; actions with others; attitudes and feelings toward humans in general; attitudes, feelings, or thoughts about themselves; goals or values; and mood). Responses were recorded verbatim and transcribed. The 1,516 nonredundant descriptors obtained were inductively reduced to 54 semantic categories. The authors could allocate almost all of these 54 categories to one of the five dimensions of the FFM. There were, however, additional dimensions not easily summarized by the FFM. For example, a dimension relating to nationalism and societal awareness emerged. Although these descriptors might fit in Category III (Conscientiousness) in the FFM, the authors suggested that their saliency in the personality descriptions was in response to the emphasis on social and political awareness in the Philippines during the time of the research. In these studies, spontaneously mentioned personality characteristics were valued because it is assumed that people frequently mention those characteristics that they think are most important or basic. Further, it is assumed that aggregating these spontaneously mentioned descriptors over groups of individuals yields a set of perceptions specific to the culture of the informants. Coding Free Descriptions The collection and categorization of free descriptions of personality are the first steps in our research program. When many people have been interviewed, the large collection of personality descriptors obtained must page_3 Page 4 be ordered. This is done by judges using a well-tested categorization system with good interjudge reliability. When the system of categories has been applied, we can assess category frequency. Then, assuming that frequency of category use indicates the degree of saliency of each personality category in a particular culture, we choose exemplars from the high-frequency categories to prepare for the second phase. In this phase, the representative selection of descriptors is put into a questionnaire format that is then given to new samples of people from the particular culture involved. They may be asked to rate themselves or others on the items selected. Finally, factor analyses of the items are used to summarize the underlying dimensions in the set of characteristics. Free Descriptions of Child Personality In the late 1980s, in his own search for the major dimensions in parental perceptions of temperament and personality in children, Kohnstamm and his students did some pilot work using parental free descriptions. These pilot studies served to develop and refine the methodology of eliciting and coding parental free descriptions. The studies demonstrated the sensitivity of the free-response format to detecting both social class and informant differences (e.g., mother versus father) in the Dutch language and culture, and they also revealed the potential of the FFM for categorizing parental descriptors. Until 1990, only one investigator had explored the structure of perceived personality in late childhood and adolescence from a FFM perspective (Digman, 1963, 1990; Digman & Inouye, 1986). During a sabbatical year together at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in 1990-1991, Kohnstamm and Halverson formulated the idea for the project described in this volume. An international group of researchers was formed with the goal of collecting free descriptions of children of different ages, in different languages and cultures. We assumed that our method of collecting free descriptions would tell us whether we would get the same or different personality dimensions over different languages and cultures. To quote from Church and Katigbak (1989): "By starting with a taxonomy of personality concepts generated independently in each culture, culture-relevant dimensions are allowed to emerge independently, providing a more convincing test of universality when comparable dimensions emerge" (p. 870). Although the societies represented in the present study are all modern, the families involved live in differing social and economic circumstances, with large differences in household income and in future prospects for the children described. With the samples of differing cultures and circumstances, we can assess whether the parents in these societies generate page_4 Page 5 temperament and personality descriptors with differing emphases, frequencies, and evaluations. When questionnaire items are distilled from the variety of terms, we can assess whether different dimensions emerge from parents' perceptions of their children's personalities in these different cultures. Method In all participating countries, personality descriptions were collected from parents of children between 2 and 13 years of age. In some samples, parents were simply asked to tell us about their children. In other samples, after an introduction in which the word "personality" was mentioned, the parents were asked, "Can you tell me what you think is characteristic of your child?" All interviews were audiotaped and subsequently transcribed verbatim. The coders used elaborate coding manuals that included instructions about units of analysis, division of phrases, dealing with repetitions, and synonymy. For our purposes, a unit of analysis was defined as an adjective, verb, noun, or phrase referring to a description of behavior, personality characteristic, or ability. Phrases referring to situational causes of behavior or to physical attributes were not coded. Because a unit of analysis could be a phrase, it was sometimes helpful to split phrases into simple, easily codable parts. Adjacent words or phrases could be divided and coded separately as two individual units if the meaning of each part was understood when considered independently. If a coder judged that meaning or context was lost by splitting the phrase, the unit was coded as one single description. For example, the phrase "She likes to play outdoors with neighbor kids" can be separated into two distinct parts: "She likes to play outdoors" and "Plays with neighbor kids." The first phrase would be coded as referring to physical activity level, and the second phrase would be coded as indicating extraversion or sociability. The phrase ''She's so quick; her head works very, very fast'' would be coded as a single unit because breaking the description into two parts could conceivably lead the coder to misinterpret "She's so quick" as referring to physical activity instead of cognitive proficiency. In free-language interviews, respondents often elaborated on a single characteristic by mentioning concrete, situation-specific behaviors to illustrate the personality characteristic. In such cases, the elaborative phrase or phrases were taken with the descriptive word or phrase and were coded as one unit of analysis. Respondents might also mention a descriptive characteristic in the past tense and contrast this with a similar descriptive characteristic in the present tense to illustrate the way a child is page_5 Page 6 now with respect to a younger age. In this case, the past-tense phrase was not coded separately, but was included in one unit with the present-tense phrase. The part of the phrase in the present tense was the subject of analysis; the past-tense word or phrase, however, might have helped the coder to assess the meaning or importance of the unit as a whole. Words and phrases that were not coded as descriptive phrases included those referring to a person other than the target child or to children in general. These were considered nonrelevant phrases. Phrases about peripheral information were also excluded; these included information connected to the main issue, but so remote as to have no immediate relevance to the target child (e.g., "Her parents are friends of mine" or "You have a lot of temper tantrums and things with all kids, you know; that is not specific to Susie, but that is something that would bother me about her"). If there was reasonable doubt as to whether a respondent was referring to the target child directly, then the word or phrase was not coded. When words or phrases were repeated verbatim or if phrases expressing the same literal meaning were used more than once in a single interview, these units were recorded and coded as repetitions, but were not included in frequency analyses more than once. The Categorization System To categorize the expressions generated by the parents, a coding system was developed. Although the system of categories was inspired by the FFM framework, with several subcategories in each of the five dimensions, an additional eight categories were added. Each major category was designated by a Roman numeral. The first five were numbered according to conventions in the FFM literature. The subcategories or facets were inductively derived. Responses are coded as Positive, Neutral, or Negative as well. For example: "Enthusiastic" is coded as IA+; "Tends to shut herself off" is coded IA . Table 1.1 shows the total system. No examples are given for responses coded as Neutral. Decisions were made on which utterances were to be used as units for coding and which utterances could be discarded. Detailed instructions were developed for this step in applying the categorization scheme. Rationale for Categories Included The origin of the first five main categories has already been explained. The subcategories within these five are our own inventions, based on clusters of high-loading items, or "facets," as published in several FFM studies. For the location of some of the subcategories (e.g., Manageable for Parents and Teachers Category II), we had no empirical basis: No page_6 Page 7 TABLE 1.1 Categories for Coding Descriptors From "Free" Personality Descriptions and Examples of Descriptors I. Extraversion 1A: Sociability outgoing versus shy 1A 1A+ Tendency to shut self off Enthusiastic Inhibited and withdrawn Totally thrilled to be alive Shy, prefers to play alone Likes to be with others 1B: Dominance, Leadership, Assertiveness 1B 1B+ Passive A leader Follows everyone Strong character Does not stand up for self Assertive 1C: Activity, Pace, Tempo, Energy, Restlessness, Vitality 1C 1C+ Quiet Active Not physically active Energetic Does not do much Always on the move II. Agreeableness 2A: Helpfulness, Cooperation, Amiability 2A 2A+ Selfish Loving, sweet Impatient Good natured Not a good helper Caring Initiates aggression 2B: Manageable for Parents and Teachers 2B 2B+ Argumentative Well behaved