03 Chapter1b
03 Chapter1b
03 Chapter1b
The lexical approach to personality is the most prominent approach in today’s personality
psychology. It is a challenging task to test its applicability to all relevant fields of personality
There are several introductions available for readers to the Big Five approach to personality,
so that here only a short overview of the main characteristics and the development of the
model are provided (see De Raad, 2000; De Raad & Perugini, 2002; John & Srivastava,
1999).
The lexical approach to personality claims that the personality relevant characteristics
of individuals become encoded into the language and so can be systematically analyzed and
taxonomized. The basic elements of personality taxonomy are traits, though research has been
extended to situations (Ten Berge & De Raad, 2002), to instincts (De Raad & Doddema,
1999) and to the nonverbal domain (Paunonen, Ashton & Jackson, 2001).
The most frequently cited definition of the lexical approach is conveyed in the lexical
Those individual differences that are the most significant in the daily transactions
of persons with each other will eventually become encoded into their language.
The more important such a difference is, the more people will notice it and wish to
talk of it, with the result that eventually they will invent a word for it (p. 204).
Pioneers of the lexical research are Allport and Odbert (1936) who constructed an
alphabetic list of traits with around 4500 stable personality characteristics. This list was
ultimately reduced to 35 traits. Ratings on those traits were factor analyzed by Cattell (1943,
1945, 1947) who first arrived to as many factors as 9-12, according to different samples and
methods. The researchers who reanalyzed his data, could not however replicate the number of
factors, and reported only five robust personality factors instead (Borgotta 1964; Digman &
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Takemoto-Chock, 1981; Fiske, 1949; Norman, 1963; Tupes & Christal, 1961). These five
The lexical Big Five factors now look back on a long tradition, and are widely
administered and researched. There is an ongoing discussion on their exact number (cf.
Ashton et al. 2004; Peabody & De Raad, 2004) or on the exact meaning of the factors (Ashton
& Lee, 2001; John & Srivastava, 1999; Peabody & De Raad, 2002), but a general consensus
Together with the development of the factor analytic methods, the research of the
lexical domain has been increased and extended. The research of the fundamental personality
factors as observed in everyday language have become more and more popular in personality
psychology and today it is one of the true leading approaches in personality and applied
personality psychology.
The psycho-lexical approach to personality yielded the “Big Five” personality factors that are
considered to represent the major domains of personality description and that are embraced by
a growing number of researchers. The main interest in the lexically oriented personality
applicability of the five factors across languages, cultures, methods, and applied fields.
Although the Big-Five dimensions have mainly been studied in adult samples, Big Five
ratings have also been obtained in samples of children and young adolescents, though less
extensively. Digman (1963), for example, started the first lexically oriented research with
His main goal was to test the complexity of personality in childhood and to search for the
fundamental dimensions of personality at an early age. Digman’s (1963, 1965, 1972) early
work was inspired and influenced by Cattel’s personality investigations. He was also looking
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for parallels between his own and Cattel’s adult data and used the advanced technology of
computers as soon as they became available. Maybe because of his focus on complexity and
his aim to search for the developmental antecedents of Cattell’s personality dimensions, he
first suggested, “seven or eight factors would be an expected value for the number of factors
Later, Digman and Takemoto-Chock (1981), Digman and Inouye (1986) and Digman
(1989) did several lexically oriented studies in developmental personality using traits and
behavioral characteristics, and finally reported five recurring factors, which they described as
equivalents of the adult Big Five factors. Digman (1994) states, that whereas the five-factor
model clearly reappears in child personality, more complex systems do not. Digman and
Shmelyov (1996) extended the investigations to the Russian language and had 480 Russian
school children rated by their teachers on three sources of scales (temperament, personality,
and education). They found high similarities with the traditional Big Five structure. This
Digman (1997) reanalyzed fourteen Big Five studies, among them four with children
and one with adolescents, and came to the conclusion that both in the developmental and adult
samples, two higher order factors (metatraits) may be distinguished: Factor α and β (Digman,
1994). Factor α was interpreted as a socialization factor relying on the Big Five factors
personal growth versus personal construction. This higher order factor captured Extraversion
and Intellect. He assumed that child, adolescent and adult studies do imply the presence of the
higher order factors and “these constructs furnish links between the atheoretical Big Five
Later, Goldberg (2001) also reanalyzed “one of the world’s richest collection of
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Digman’s six data-pools from the years between 1959 and 1967. Goldberg (2001) concluded
that in all six samples of children no other broad domains than the Big Five factors appear,
and so provided significant evidence for the Big Five relevance of teacher based personality
assessment in childhood.
Hampson et al. (2001) relied on the developmental data, and searched for former
participants who - in the meantime - had already reached their late adulthood. They collected
personality relevant data from as much as 60 percent of the original sample with the goal of
The classification into the Big Five factors of teacher’s assessment of traits in children
aged 4-12 was described by Mervielde (1994) in his study on the relevance of the Big Five in
childhood. In another research group, the validity of the Big Five factors on the basis of
teachers’ ratings of children‘s personality was studied (Mervielde, Buyst & De Fruyt, 1995).
Both studies yielded a factor structure of personality characteristics fairly well corresponding
to the Big Five factors, especially for the ages of 7-12 years. Mervielde
and De Fruyt (2000) investigated the relevance of the Big Five model for the age group of 9
to 10 year olds. All of the five factors could not be fully recovered. Instead, their study
lesser degree of differentiation at younger ages that relies on the limited cognitive abilities of
children on one hand, and to highly evaluative judgments typical for the age group, on the
other.
John, Caspi, Robins, Moffitt and Stouthamer-Loeber (1994) searched for the Big
Five in young adolescent boys (aged 12 and 13 years old) and used ratings by the mothers.
They developed Big Five relevant scales on the basis of the 100 items of the California Child
Q-set (CCQ; Block & Bock, 1980). Using a set of scales largely based on the CCQ items,
they concluded on seven factors, a ‘Little-Five’ structure, fairly equivalent to the adult Big
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Five factors, plus two other factors, respectively labeled Irritability (i.e., “He whines and
pouts often”) and Positive Activity (for example: “He is physically active”). They argued, that
the two additional factors are “relatively independent personality dimensions in early
adolescence and that they may eventually merge with Extraversion and Neuroticism,
respectively, to form a single super ordinate dimension in adulthood” (John et al, 1994,
p.173).
similarities to the Big Seven factor model (Almagor, Tellegen & Waller, 1995; Tellegen &
Waller, 1987), that was found cross-culturally stable (Benet & Waller, 1995; Waller, 1999).
Irritability shared a lot with Negative Emotionality (“nervous, moody, feeling hurt”) and
Positive Activity with Positive Emotionality (“sociable, animated, energetic”). Still, John et
al. (1994), in spite of their arguments in favor of these two additional factors, recommended
the use of only the traditional Big Five factors for further research purposes until the
acceptance of the two additional dimensions is proven through independent research. They
developmental and adult personality research. Nevertheless, they also suggested, that the two
additional factors could be added to any instrument as separate scales. The two additional
study Lamb, Chuang, Wessels, Broberg and Hwang (2002) failed to replicate Irritability and
The following developmental studies, which provided comprehensive and international data
of child and young adolescent personality, contributed substantially to child personality and
temperament research and yielded new aspects for research in developmental psychology.
Research projects that aimed at defining the five dimensions in children’s personality
were conducted on the basis of a ‘lexicon’ of free parental descriptions of children (Buyst, De
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Fruyt & Mervielde, 1994; Havill, Allen, Halverson & Kohnstamm, 1994; Kohnstamm,
Mervielde, Besevegis & Halverson, 1995; Slotboom, Elphink & Kohstamm, 1996). These
studies came up with very similar concepts to the adult Big Five dimensions. Central
questions to Kohnstamm et al. (1998) were which antecedents personality and temperament
have, at what age these individual differences emerge, how universal these dimensions in
childhood are, and how early personality characteristics can be interpreted in terms of the
domains of the Big Five factors (Kohnstamm, Halverson, Mervielde & Havill, 1998).
Kohnstamm et al.’s Big Five oriented study was based on free descriptions collected
children between the ages of 2 and 12 were described in this research and over two thousand
mothers and fathers provided personality relevant data about their children (see Slotboom &
Elphick, 1998). There was a remarkable variation in the average number of descriptors used
by parents: it varied between 37 for Germany and 11 for the U.S.A. These variations were
considered to be partly cultural and partly situational as the interview settings varied across
the countries (Kohnstamm, Halverson, Mervielde & Havill, 1998). In regards to the relevance,
Mervielde (1998) reported that 68 percent of the free descriptors used by parents could be
descriptions of personality by the parents in all age groups, it does not answer the question
whether children and young adolescents themselves can fill out Big Five instruments.
According to Erikson (1968), crucial changes occur in adolescence during the development of
identity. The choice of an occupation, the sexual orientation, and the adaptation of a value
system are important markers of this life-segment. Blasi and Milton (1991) investigated the
subjective experience of changes in self in adolescence and found that self-identity differs
drastically between early and middle adolescence: older adolescents have a more emotional
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and more important relation to themselves and are committed to being loyal to themselves.
Changes in the Big Five factors through adolescence were investigated by McCrae, et
al. (2002) by obtaining mean level changes in the Big Five dimensions. McCrae et al. (2002)
found that three of the five factors remain stable through adolescence, namely Extraversion,
Two-year test-retest reliabilities were reported by Pullmann, Kiik and Allik (2004)
who administered the NEO-FFI in an Estonian sample of adolescents. Pullmann et al. (2004)
obtained stabilities of the personality dimensions in the group of 16-18 year old adolescents
(from .62 to .73). In the youngest age group of the twelve year olds the test re-test reliabilities
were overall lower (from .48 to .57). In a nine-year longitudinal study, Asendorpf and Van
Aken (2003) investigated Big Five relevant personality judgments and behavioral
and school achievement correlates and found a consistent relationship between these variables
through childhood. A relative stability of the Big Five factors could be observed, especially at
later adolescence, which spoke in favor of early formation of basic personality characteristics.
Nevertheless, recent results reported changes in the Big Five characteristics when a larger life
spectrum was investigated later in life (Helson, Kwan, John & Jones, 2002; Srivastava, John,
When looking for links between childhood and adulthood, it seems inevitable that
some continuity exists between the different developmental stages. The real challenge for
future research is, therefore, not only in the investigation of the origins and reasons of this
stability and robustness in personality, but also the investigation of the changing
developmental aspects.
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In conclusion, in order to be able to provide more comprehensive results on the
stability and change of personality over the life-span development, replications of former
results are needed together with more developmentally oriented personality research that
covers a larger life span from childhood to adulthood, that relies on different methods, and
1.2.5 Recent developmental issues in Big Five - developmental Big Five measures
According to Mervielde and De Fruyt (2002), there are only a few developmentally oriented
Big Five inventories for children and adolescents. There were a few attempts to apply an adult
personality measure at the end of the ‘90s, for example, by Parker and Stumpf (1998), or Roth
(2002), who used the NEO-FFI and by De Fruyt, Mervielde, Hoekstra and Rolland (2000),
who used the NEO-PI-R with adolescents. These applications were performed with
mostly the NEO-PI-R was administered to subjects as young as 11 years old (for example,
To fill the gap between Big Five and developmental research Mervielde and De Fruyt
(1999) developed the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (HiPIC, Mervielde &
De Fruyt, 1999), which they based on the free personality descriptions described earlier. This
measure comprises the five Big Five relevant dimensions Extraversion, Benevolence,
can be administered to the age group of 6 to 12 years old. The authors suggested also using it
for self-ratings of adolescents, although the HiPIC is primarily an observer inventory. The
inventory consists of 144 behavior-oriented items (like “want to shine at everything”) and
takes, according to the authors, 15-20 minutes to fill out (Mervielde & De Fruyt, 2002).
Barbaranelli, Caprara, Rabasca and Pastorelli (2003) constructed another Big Five
measure for adolescents, which they called the Big-Five Questionnaire - Children version
(BFQ-C). This measure was developed for 9-13 year old children and adolescents and can be
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administered as an observer measure for teachers and parents but can also be used for self-
ratings. It consists of 65 items that are distributed equally (13 each) among the following Big
and Intellect/Openness (cf. Barabaranelli & Caprara, 2002). In their study, a moderately
significant relation between observer-ratings and self-ratings was found, but two factors
While Van Lieshout and Haselager (1994) argued that teachers are better raters than mothers,
Barbaranelli et al. (2003) found ratings by the mothers more informative. Finally, the authors
concluded that, in spite of the incongruence in the different factor solutions, this measure is a
good candidate for applied settings as well, such as in counseling or in the educational field
A less known questionnaire for self-ratings for adolescents was developed by Tatum
(2000). This measure, the Adolescent Big Five Inventory (ABFI), consists of 85 items and
includes items for measuring social desirability. The author found significant relations to the
Agreeableness. Lounsbury, Tatum, Gibson, Park, Sundstrom and Wilburn reported to have
developed the Adolescent Personal Style Inventory (APSI, 2003). This measure also aims to
measure the Big Five domains, and is reported to be robust and reliable in adolescence.
developmental setting, not only the developmental antecedents of the Big Five, but also their
relation to other aspects that have been linked to adolescent personality, should be
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1.3 CONCLUSIONS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This present work aims to contribute to the investigation of the Big Five dimensions, and their
guidelines provide a firm basis for the following empirical chapters. While doing so, the
following five research questions are put into the focus of the investigation:
prevention correspond?
5. Do personality variables play a predicting role in legal drug prevention (for example,
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