The long-term objectives of this five-year project are to continue to explore the dimensional structure of parental descriptions of their young children aged two to twelve years. In the past 3 years we have gathered free description data from parents in eight countries around the world and research teams in each country have explored the dimensional structure of personality descriptions of parents and teachers. This project continues that work by examining in detail the structure and construct validity of the U. S. questionnaire in 3 related modules of research. In module one we will create a new instrument based on our analyses of separate questionnaires created for 3, 6 and 9-12 year age groups in our past research. When a robust factor structure is obtained, we use the new instrument in several studies in Module 2 to examine (a) relations to observed and rated behavior in preschool children (b) links to other instruments of adaptive functioning (behavior problems, social competence) in children aged 6 to 12 and (c) the construct validity of the instrument as assessed by multi-trait-multi-method analyses. In Module 3 we examine the long-term links between temperament, behavior problems and family risk scores in preschool children and measures of adult personality and social functioning of adolescence in the Georgia Longitudinal Study. By linking the child and adult domains, we will contribute to the unification of the study of personality and adaptive processes from childhood to adulthood, as well as examine their cross-cultural robustness. This study will contain data on the links between normal personality-processes and descriptions of positive adaptive functioning and negative problematic behavior in several countries.
| Deal, James E; Halverson Jr, Charles F; Martin, Roy P et al. (2007) The Inventory of Children's Individual Differences: development and validation of a short version. J Pers Assess 89:162-6 |
| Halverson, Charles F; Havill, Valerie L; Deal, James et al. (2003) Personality structure as derived from parental ratings of free descriptions of children: the inventory of child individual differences. J Pers 71:995-1026 |
