Delineating Personality Traits in Childhood and Adolescence: Associations Across Measures, Temperament, and Behavioral Problems

The current investigation addressed several questions in the burgeoning area of child personality assessment. Specifically, the present study examined overlapping and nonoverlapping variance in two prominent measures of child personality assessment, followed by tests of convergent and divergent validity with child temperament and psychopathology. Informant report (72.1% mother) was obtained for a community sample of 803 youth (M-age = 11.34 years; 51.6% female). The results revealed strong convergence between two empirically based measures of child personality traits, although some discrepancies were noted. The results from analyses predicting temperament and psychopathology were complex, suggesting that higher order child personality traits account for both shared and unique variance in these constructs, relative to one another. Overall, the current investigation provides a multifaceted contribution to evidence for construct validity of child personality traits and highlights the need for subsequent research in this area.