PS375 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Kroger, Multiple Birth
Document Summary
College-educated women"s personality development in adulthood: perceptions and age differences. When studying personality development, to ensure findings are generalizable and to begin to disentangle age from cohort effects it is valuable to use longitudinal data over the course of adulthood from multiple birth cohorts. Developmental period of adulthood spans from age 18 or 21 to death. Five aspects of personality (identity certainty, confident power, concern with aging, generativity, and personal distress) were assessed in a cross-sectional study of college educated women who at time of data collection were adults. Respondents rated each personality domain for how true it was of them at the time, and they then rated the other 2 ages either retrospectively or prospectively. Personal distress is considered to be equally important in adulthood at all ages. Identity certainty, generativity, and confident power were predicted to be tied to particular life stages and thus have developmental trajectories that rise and fall with particular periods, defining relatively discrete stages.
