Funding is sought for a five year program to study the dimensional structure of African-American parental descriptions of their children. The long term goal of this project is the development of a series of instruments that will measure the dimensional structure of personality, temperament, and values of young African-American children from 2 to 12 years of age. The significance of this research is based on our addressing African-American cultural issues within a cross-cultural context while simultaneously addressing the lack of consensus regarding the main dimensions of child personality (and/or temperament and values). First, using a race/ethnic homogenous design, we will examine how two groups of African-American parent informants, differing in social class, describe their children. Using natural language descriptors and lexical procedures we will study the saliency and structure of personality in two social class groups of African-American children. Simultaneously using the same methodology of African-American parent and teacher descriptors, we will study the saliency and structure of problem (or maladaptive) behavior and values in the children. Second, we will develop a series of race/ethnic homogeneous individual difference instruments for two social class groups that will measure personality, behavior problems and value structure in young African-American children based on natural language descriptions by parents and teachers. Third, at each level we will use a variety of techniques common to cross-cultural research and research with indigenous populations to ensure conceptual equivalence and cultural sensitivity (social class relevant focus groups to back translate, sort descriptions and label categories, and perform prototype analysis). After we have constructed our instruments we will assess the robustness of our lexically based structural models across the two African-American social class groups and with other lexically derived models in the United States and other countries. We will study our constructs through a series of semantic differential studies across our social class groups and across samples in USA and other countries. We will begin to initiate cross-cultural and developmental studies concerning the validity of these new instruments. Using a race/homogenous design will allow us to explore intragroup variability, individual differences and sources of deviation within the African American child population. Culturally valid measures of racially minority children should aid in the study of healthy development for all children. Through adopting the lexical natural language approach and collaborating with multinational research teams, we hope to contribute to the unification of the study of personality development from childhood to adulthood.
| Baker, Spencer R; Victor, James B; Chambers, Anthony L et al. (2004) Adolescent personality: a five-factor model construct validation. Assessment 11:303-15 |
| 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 |
