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Child personality measures as contemporaneous and longitudinal predictors of social behaviour in pre-school
Maja Zupančič & Tina Kavčič
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Written in English. | Published: April 4, 2005
Abstract: Predictive relations from personality measures to children's social behaviour in pre-school were examined for 3 year old children (at Time 1; T1) who were reassessed one year later (at Time 2; T2). At both times, mothers and fathers separately rated children's personality characteristics using the Inventory of Child Individual Differences (Halverson et al., 2003), while the pre-school teachers assessed the same children on the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation Scale (LaFreniere et al., 2001). Three general predictive models were examined, contemporaneous (at T1 and T2), longitudinal, and cumulative. Mother- and father-rated child personality was contemporaneously predictive of children's social behaviour as assessed by their pre-school teachers. The most consistent predictions across the spouses and at both times of measurement were obtained for child externalizing behaviour. More disagreeable and emotionally stable children, as opposed to their less disagreeable and more in stable counterparts, were concurrently observed to exhibit more externalizing tendencies during the time spent in pre-school. Maternal reports were longitudinally predictive of children's social competence and internalizing behaviour and the father reports predicted internalizing and externalizing behaviour one year later. Neuroticism at age 3 was consistently linked to internalizing tendencies at age 4 across parents both longitudinally and cumulatively. Father-rated Disagreeableness at age 3 was predictive of externalizing behaviour one year later in both longitudinal and cumulative models, while the contemporaneous information on child Disagreeableness and Neuroticism (reversed) at T2, independent of the respective child traits at T1, significantly improved the cumulative predictions of externalizing behaviour from maternal reports. In general, child personality scores derived from maternal data sets were more powerful predictors of children's social behaviour across the models than those obtained from paternal reports. Contemporaneous relations were stronger than longitudinal ones, predictions of social competence were relatively the weakest and the longitudinal links between child personality and later internalizing tendencies were somewhat stronger than were the associations between personality and children's externalizing tendencies at age 4.
Keywords: personality, childhood development, The Inventory of Individual Differences, multiple-informant approach, social behaviour, pre-school children
